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2nd Thousand 

THE NEW 
BRITAIN 

by 

WARWICK DRAPER 

leing an Essay formerly called "The Tower," by 

Watchman^ and written in time of War as 

a Vision of Peace, 



Price 2s. net. 



JEADLEY BROS. PUBLISHERS, LTD. 
72 Oxford Street, W. 



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I WARWICK DRAPER §" 

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First published in ig i 8 as 
THE TQW£%, by "Watchman" 

%e-issued 1 919 



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DEDICATION. 
To G.D. 

TO you it is natural to offer this image 
of a Happier England, the first un- 
published sketch of which, done before 
the War, belongs only to you. And, indeed, 
you know that I do so first offer it in the trust 
that our own children and the other children 
of this generation may see some fulfilment of 
what it so imperfectly presents. 

Tou would wish that on a public page of 
print I should not acknowledge all that the 
effort owes to the encouragement of your 
fearless and tolerant opinions. But you at 
least know why, being no professional writer 
of books, I yet venture to put this small one 
through the press. ' 

In these dark days of public trouble it may 
be well to say something in good spirits, and 
wise to strike notes of cheerful confidence 
towards a fabric of Society which shall have 
less failure and baseness of Life than in the 
days before the War, follozving Truth rather 
than advertisement, and worshipping Great- 
ness before money. It may be even wiser, 
before the fury and wastage forced upon 
unwilling peoples by a desperate and insensate 
militarism yield to a secure Peace and the 
momentous problems that will follow demob- 
ilisation, to indicate lines by which ferment 
and disappointment may be avoided and some 
v 



compensation found for so much willing and 
amazing Sacrifice. This image may seem to 
make only brief, if deliberately definite , allu- 
sions to certain changes in big international 
arrangements and our own constitution, 
both at home and overseas, towards which 
we appear to be clearly moving. But those 
changes will come with more durable value 
and security to the State by an honest spiritual 
conversion of the democracy through every 
individual conscience than from without or 
from on high. Parliament and newspapers 
are all very well, if only we would all think 
more for ourselves and in action continue to 
remember our neighbours. 1 have therefore 
tried to describe, out of certain recent experi- 
ences, some of the conditions and motives in 
our own Society which seem to be indispens- 
able as means to the end, finding in the War 
the great Opportunity . 

We entered into the War out of a fidelity 
to outraged Belgium which will endure as a 
symbol of mankind's protest against the 
materialistic idea of a domineering autocracy. 
Less directly, but in very truth, we also 
entered in because the inevitable end of a long 
calm due to mutual fear is explosion. If, as 
is likely with Britons, we are to save our name 
for loyalty to contracts, public or private, 
whether with fellow-countrymen or with 
foreigners, towards either the powerful or the 
weak, it can only be on the basis of willing 
vi 



Altruism and of Liberty free from that fear. 
Remembering that men and women must be 
the slaves either of duty or of force, let us so 
remain the former as to become the masters of 
our own best Liberty. It is thus that States- 
manship is found to be the art of understand- 
ing and leading the masses or the majority; its 
glory to lead them not where they want to go 
but where they ought to go. Order and Pro- 
gress in the new world, even more than in the 
old, can only come that way. If, as we are 
told, there is to be a revolution of human 
hearts and social forms towards such a Free- 
dom in this homeland, let us work it with 
justice and moderation, worthily of our 
Anglo-Saxon character at its best. 

These islands are only a part, but the first 
and chief part, of a Britain that henceforth 
exists in every continent, mingling the ideas 
and commerce of its English-speaking sons 
and daughters with those of a many-tongued 
humanity. With your leave, therefore, and in 
homage, 1 also now offer this presentment of 
the Tower set on a rock in the home-waters to 
the men and women from all over the world 
who, abroad and at home, will have saved it 
for the purposes of the invisible and 
intangible power which we call God. 

Christmas, 1917. W.T>. 



Vll 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. THE COMING BIRTH-HOUR i 

II. IN THE LOOM OF WAR 4 

III. THIRTY YEARS ON 13 

IV. IN THE CHAPEL OF HEROIC 

SOULS 20 

V. A JUSTER INDUSTRIALISM 3 6 

VI. VILLAGE COMMUNITIES 61 

VII. NEW TOWNS 71 

VIII. THE COUNTRYSIDE 87 

IX. ON LEARNING TO LIVE 1 10 

X. A MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL 127 



FOR the meaning of the title of "The 
Tower" the reader is referred to what 
the Priest says on page 34. An emblem 
of it appears on the map-design of the 
Home-Islands of Great Britain, where the 
colours have an economic significance — 
purple and grey for the older crowded 
industrial centres, the new ones, let us hope, 
more green; brown for areas of mixed agri- 
culture and golden-yellow for wheat dis- 
tricts; light yellow for upland sheep 
pastures, and green for districts where 
cattle are most numerous. The encircling 
sky carries air-craft with a great passenger- 
ship for crossing the Atlantic, a smaller 
mail-plane bound for Paris, and other un- 
known possibilities for the future. 

viii 



§1. THE COMING BIRTH-HOUR 

YOU, reader, may know that cun- 
ning English picture by Brown 
which he called " Work," big with 
anecdote and something deeper, 
done about 1850 with hot pig- 
ments and the zest of starving genius. In the 
Hampstead street the navvies dig a trench 
across the frequented foot-way where the city 
banker and his fair daughter sit a-horseback to 
watch them; the beauteous dame of bell-like 
skirts trips along after the ragged weed-seller; 
the orphaned children with " a philosophic 
babe " watch the by-play of the dogs, and 
against the railing lean the two brain workers 
— one " a priest without guile, honouring all 
men, never weary in well-doing," and the 
other a modern Socrates, merciless against vice 
and foolishness, one who " with a word may 
have centupled the tide of emigration, with 
another have quenched the political passions 
of both factions .... and still be walking 
about little known to some," but both aware 
by the insight of prophets as to the daring and 
endurance of navvy- work and its value. 

Thus Madox Brown chose to paint Carlyle 
who had cried, years earlier, that " England 
is full of wealth, yet England is dying of 



The TOWER. 

inanition " ; who foretold that " by degrees we 
shall again have a Society with something of 
Heroism in it, something of Heaven's bless- 
ing on it ... . instead of Mammon- 
Feudalism with unsold cotton shirts and 
Preservation of the Game, noble just Indus- 
trialism and Government by the Wisest!" 
who murmured that " The centuries are big ; 
and the birth-hour is coming, not yet come." 
And two full generations later what would 
Carlyle have said and Madox Brown have 
drawn if in War-time they had watched one 
of the thousand feverish centres of industry 
producing unparalleled munitions of terrific 
ruin ? With pen and brush what record could 
they have sent on to posterity of Britain's 
miracle — the unstinted contribution of valour 
and sacrifice and endurance to a task as odious 
as tragic, the grim, long Catastrophe wider 
than Europe and deep as Hell, begotten upon 
the mean or angry fears of a bewildered 
humanity by evil demons of monomaniac 
absolutism or desperate militarism or com- 
mercial greed? Here, in this beloved land, 
the western outpost of the liberties of the race, 
the call to arms for myriads had the answer 
not generous merely, but heroic. Into what 
unity of a happier commonwealth could the 
disaster be retrieved after such exhilaration of 
Life-service, such willing and even merry 
experience of the high- waged teacher, Death ? 
2 



The TOWER. 
Braced in fortitude by their own losses or 
kindled by the hope of a nobler Society for 
the up-springing children who shall inherit 
the world left by War, the wiser among the 
folk at home not only kept the fires burning, 
but toiled in the workshops of the mind to 
forge and frame a finer structure of human 
affairs for the future. Thus Brown, chief 
painter of our island's character, shall not 
have painted nor shall Carlyle have thought in 
vain, nor shall Ruskin and Morris have idly 
fixed on the consciences of an uneasy genera- 
tion their visions of what Plato and More had 
seen before them. For nowadays, transcend- 
ing the records of painter Brangwyn's robust 
tribute to Labour and Bone's nimble, faithful 
picture-narrative of endurance on that deso- 
lated Western Front, and the paradoxes, too 
tiresome if not too often true, of Shaw and 
the brilliant, uncanny material from which 
Wells gave history to a public that clamoured 
for fiction, the War exorcised in clearer form 
and more majestic dignity a compelling image 
which man's inhumanity to man and the cruel, 
subtle cynicism of every kind of ephemeral 
despot had too long held captive in the caves 
of Time .... 



t^» t^> t^> t^i «^> t//* ijO* i& tfr t&> <^> t^> t^» t^ t^» t^» t^> ^ 

§11. IN THE LOOM OF WAR 

t^> v^> «^> c^> t^J k5^ «^> t^i ctf>-> t^> t^J t^ t^ t^> t^> t^> t^* «^> 

IN the third year of the Strife I travelled 
from London to Coventry on a housing 
errand. The intricate task of persuading 
the over-driven directors of ordnance 
works to insist upon the City Council (of 
which some of them were members) so plan- 
ning new workers' dwellings as to be a pride 
and not a reproach for the future, and of fixing 
the proportions between public utility loans 
from Government and the money put up by 
private enterprise was an exhausting affair, 
and as I climbed the Sunday evening train I 
resolved to leave the sheets of plans and 
quantities and loosely drafted report until the 
fresh to-morrow and to amuse an hour with a 
stay at Matching's Easy in Wells's veracious 
history of Mr. Britling. 
• I had walked from the Daimler works to 
the station, past the little ivied house where 
(ghosts now of another day) Thackeray, 
George Eliot, and Herbert Spencer once did 
visit, to the Bridge on which Tennyson stood 
to watch the three tall spires. Ceaselessly, 
with columns of smoke streaking and smirch- 
ing the sky and a hum as of many lathes and 
benches, men and women and youths and girls 
(what an apprenticeship to Life!) by day and 
4 



The TOWER. 

by night turned out the munitions of Death, 
as if to agree with that same Tennyson that 

he needs must fight 
To make true Peace his own, 
He needs must combat might with might, 
Or might would rule alone. 

Cross Cheaping was packed with a crowd 
quite curious in its ways, almost artificial and 
feverish to the first look, the maids dressed 
out in unusual finery and few enough lads to 
escort them until you saw, at a certain hour, 
that in dingy, machine-soiled clothes or the 
khaki of A.S.C. or R.F.C. the men were 
among them. And as the time for the London 
train came on, the crowd moved to the railway 
to send off its " on leave " men or to see 
others send them off — the sailorman, with his 
ship's name blank on his cap and three girls 
lively on his arm; the stolid, proud father 
from a farm out Ryton way, come with 
" Mother " and the children to God-speed the 
boy to — what God might have in store for 
him; the two sisters without a brother of their 
own or another's to share the small drama, 
wistful (if you could go behind the cheerful 
mask of their healthy, honest faces) whether 
the War they, too, were serving in would ever 
leave enough lads to go round in an honest 
mating; the upstanding, clean-knit figure of 
a young corporal of artillery (in the counting- 
house at Lipton's Bradford branch a year 

5 



The TOWER. 

ago) talking forced trivialities to cheer the 
sweetheart from whom the train and the dark 
Future would presently take him; the 
seasoned, jolly sergeant, with a bit of South 
African medal ribbon, in whom, as he chaffed 
with his family and a civilian neighbour's, you 
could not recognise the parade-ground terror 
of the dull recruit; and scurrying wildly, like 
a comment on a small cosmos that seemed so 
outwardly healthy (yes, like the ragged weed- 
seller in Brown's picture), a draggled, hunted 
spectre of nobody's woman, some poor, sinful 
victim, searching for someone, pitiful. . . . 

Of such, before and since the days of Dum- 
drudge, are they whom dynasts and things 
dynastic have ever sent to War, Bellona's 
heroic but unfamed servants. 

Mr. Britling and his tale slept on for me. 

There were three of my fellow-travellers 
who counted; two others slept, tired or dull. 
And these three seemed to me to be the 
epitome of the whole — Saul, Hucks, and 
Taylor, three musketeers for this journey 
only, little likely ever to meet me or one an - 
other again, and Saul will forgive me if we do 
(but, indeed, I should like to). Hucks 
(R.F.A. 6 1 st Division) was a bright fellow. 
" going across next month," eager, sensible, 
. . . . " last year, it makes me laugh, I used 
to make the cartons for Player's cigarettes all 
day, machine tending, and every morning of 
6 



The TOWER, 
a summer before I went to the shop I had 
a spin on my cycle round Kenilworth or Dun- 
church way, so as to keep fit." And Taylor 
(6th Warwickshires), thick-set, big-handed 
(like Michelangelo's great hobbledehoy 
" David "), silent, used to animals, the kind 
of lad who would not in the least understand 
why the trade-union leader should moan 
for him as " cannon-fodder," sat so listening 
to our talk that one wondered if it was quite 
fair to speak of preparing a better rural life 
against the day of his return. And how shall 
one forget Saul, dapper in a new outfit 
of khaki drill, sun-helmet and all, R.A.M.C, 
leaving to-morrow for Bombay ? He was not 
yet one-and-twenty, the law's " infant " still. 
He had seen a year of the real thing, " Festu- 
bert and all that," in Strathcona's Horse, 
from which he had been discharged or ex- 
changed, so hurt in some way that he was 
still pale and nervous. But before returning 
to his home in the States (" My dad has done 
well out of horse-drafts by your Govern- 
ment ! ") he wanted to see more of it, and so 
had offered for R.A.M.C. in India — not yet 
twenty-one! Rather a dandy, his hair 
brushed back like a shop-youth, he produced 
a vulgar postcard out of Birmingham and 
then (reader, this is what you call really true) 
a grimy pocket " Euclid " which, when we 
had done talking, he read up to Euston. As 

7 



The TOWER. 

a boy his father had sent him for two years 5 
schooling to the John Lyon School at Harrow. 

" It was no use! Tell Mr. , if you ever 

see him, that you've met me. He was a 
good sort, but he always said Saul was the 
most tiresome boy he had struck, and I guess 
I was! " And this lad, as Hucks and Taylor 
and I listened to him, had already been in 
bloody battles for the aims of the Allies, and 
made no boast of it. . . . 

For long that night the wonder as to those 
three comrades agitated my brain. Where 
would any two of them be when Peace 
should return? By what right did I, of 
twice their years, who had for good or 
ill enjoyed the youth which they were now 
offering, leave them to sacrifice it ? To what 
England would they return when they had 
saved her ? What common ideal, consciously 
or sub-consciously, did they follow in leaving 
field and workshop and crossing the ocean ? 
Out of all this upheaving trouble, the sorrow- 
pangs of such heroic self-deliverance, w T hat 
lay among us, " convulsively, nigh des- 
perately, struggling to be born " ? My 
schooling, such as it was, told me that in the 
old days, on so small a scale compared with 
this, Saul, Hucks and Taylor had fought at 
Marathon when the Athenians led their allies 
against the Persian Dynast, who declared to 
his hosts : " I intend with you to march 



The TOWER. 

through all the parts of Europe and to reduce 
the whole earth into one Empire, so that not 
only the guilty, but likewise those who have 
not offended us, must equally submit to the 
Yoke of Servitude "; and that, once more, in 
Saxon times they had fought with Danes 
round a thorn-tree on the Berkshire down or 
on the tide of Poole harbour as it streamed 
up to the mounded walls of Wareham, and 
on St. Crispin's Day at Agincourt, or on the 
little wooden forts that chased the Spanish 
castles round the coasts of Antrim, or, 
backed by Prussians, had, after weary years 
of struggle, pulled the French tyrant down 
at Waterloo. So that, as the gentle American 
sage could say, heralding the return of a 
potent unity to the two great Anglo-Saxon 
peoples, he saw England " not dispirited, not 
weak, but well remembering that she has seen 
dark days before; indeed, with a kind of in- 
stinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy 
day, and that in a storm of battle and calamity- 
she has a secret vigour and a pulse like a 
cannon." . . . 

But how measure against this immense ruin 
of great tracts of Europe under the storm 
opened by the bomb at Sarajevo, a re-birth 
worth the loss ? For what end (so works our 
mentality, whether we reckon by theology 
or no) will the thousands who built our stone- 
walls or laid the hedges or sang an inspired 

9 



The TOWER. 

song or packed dry-goods, have kept their 
rendezvous with Death and bloodily wrestled 
with him for victory? What comfort shall 
come to the father whom his son shall not 
follow in his calling, and to the mother who 
cannot again bear a babe and nurse and train 
him to be a shining pillar of support? The 
questions surge in their tide and will not be 
denied by hardness of heart or blindness of 
vision. What, cries the Stoic, means the 
Friend behind all these Phenomena ? What 
indeed? echoes the little Cynic. Oh, what 
indeed? in agony murmur the widowed 
maids, and the multitude of the bereaved in 
all nations. 

" There is no alleviation for the sufferings 
of mankind except veracity of thought and 
action, and the resolute facing of the world 
as it is." Even Huxley's prescience had its 
limitations; but what analysis, if he had sur- 
vived to it, would his master-mind have given 
to the organism whose growth our planet is 
now developing! — its germs, its very nerve- 
centres palpable to his touch, but its spirit, 
its atmosphere, hardly seen. " Veracity of 
thought and action." ... If only men and 
women would think simply and bravely for 
themselves, and so having thought, however 
swiftly, act slowly in accordance with their 
thoughts ! What blind entanglements, what 
brutal maxims, might thus be avoided in 
10 



The TOWER. 

public and private life ! But, after all, " the 
world as it is," which Huxley bade us face 
resolutely, has for the modern generations of 
our human swarm what the great Frenchman 
who died by a bullet on the eve of the War, 
called " an invisible ground of common im- 
pressions .... forces half instinctive, for 
that very reason immense and formidable." 
And to Jaures, who abhorred the ugly spasms 
of violent Revolution and laboured for the 
methodical and legal organisation of the 
forces of the proletariat under the law of the 
democracy and universal suffrage, the great 
outstanding fact of his world was the growth 
in numbers, in solidarity, in self-conscious- 
ness, of the workers, having at last a definite 
aim and a clear ideal of a new social order, 
It was the rise of the workers, " a flowing 
tide, that the divine breath has stirred," which 
Mazzini watched " not with fear, but with 
the loving reverence with which one watches 
a great providential fact." . . . 

Blinded by the dream of your ambition for 
a unity unknown to and unattainable by our 
mixed humanity, vaulting in the dark among 
your deadly fireworks for a throne as high as 
the God's whom you dare to invoke as Ally, 
art thou, O latest and last of the Kaisers, the 
instrument of that very God, setting purblind 
men to clear their hearts and, by this bloody 
deluge of their own creating, sweeping what 
II 



The TOWER. 
is stale, unprofitable, rotten and unjust in our 
human scheme away into the ocean of ob- 
livion? Do Love and Sacrifice accept you 
as their agent? Incredible, yet seeming 
true. . . . 

Thus excited in my mind by the day's out- 
look on the world, I let myself, a tired travel- 
ler, in at my lodging. 

The outlook seemed so vast, so mixed, so 
tangled, so desperate; big perhaps with a re- 
birth for that nobler Society, mixed in an 
infinite variety, whence Man could once again 
trace the pattern of a scheme of beauty, and 
therefore not hopeless, but full of wonder and 
promise. If only thought could be deepened 
and action simplified ! — the Real reached after, 
beyond the grasped Phenomenon, Life's lets 
and hindrances faced with a cheerful heart, 
Life its own reward beyond the puny prize 
for which we grope and strain, Life kindled 
once again with the unending effort to attain 
the God that is infinite. 

" A dream," I murmured, as my limbs and 
senses yielded to sleeping, after a day of such 
tiring excitement. 



12 



t^> t^> 10^ L0^ tj0^ t^> t^> e^> t^J t^> t^5 t^> t^> t^> t^> LP* tj0*l t&i 

§111. THIRTY YEARS ON 

t^> t^» l^» t^> t^« C^> «^» t^> «^> t^3 C^> t^> t^> t^> ttf>~. t^> t^> C^> 

SLOWLY I realised what I was about, 
as if great spaces were rushing past 
me in a dream. What had roused my 
mind was the noise of one motor after 
another firing, propellers shining on 
both sides of the fuselage of the great aero- 
plane on which, it appeared, I was travelling. 
The wonderful thing was climbing rapidly, 
but steadily, on a long curve. As my senses 
awoke I found I was leaning my elbows on 
the rim of a kind of cuddy, looking forward 
at the head and shoulders of the pilot and 
another passenger, and now back at the tail 
of the ship, her rudders and elevators seeming 
far away. As the aeroplane swung bumpily 
through lower clouds at a tilted angle, I could 
stand the rush of air, exhilarating, bewilder- 
ing. . . . But as she was put along a more 
level road the speed drove me to shelter in the 
chamber — where, closed in and at ease, I could 
watch the countryside below me through a 
latticed floor and sideways through small 
windows. Gliding at 8,000 feet above 
Mother Earth's uplands of Hampshire, what 
wonder, what ecstasy ! " Wonderful is man," 
said the Greek poet to me, as I felt the double 
fascination — the curiosity to watch the pilot's 

13 



The TOWER. 

feet on the rudder bar and elbows on his 
wheel, as by bits of inches he controlled 
ailerons and elevator, and the vision of dear 
England — the farmlands that roll up from 
Southampton, the sheds by Basingstoke where 
other bird-monsters dived and swept around 
us, and just beyond, close to the South- 
western electric railroad, that lovely Basing 
village with its cluster of farms and homes 
round the warm brick church and the broken 
stream which in the days of the War moved 
the hearts of the Australian soldiers as they 
were borne this way. . . . 

Following the track by Aldershot and 
Farnborough and Woking, we sped through 
a Surrey that was familiar to me, and yet, as 
we drove near Wimbledon, seemed not a little 
tidier, if I could judge rightly from above as 
our pilot put his engines now on one motor 
now on the other, the wind singing in the 
wires as we sped on a decline towards the south 
bank of the Thames. 

We crossed the river at a low altitude. Our 
pilot, it seemed, knew the beauty of it in the 
evening light — the stream a kind of free 
captive between the limits which our early 
forefathers set to it, rising on the flood which 
even at Westminster and past Chelsea and 
Wandsworth to Hammersmith brings some 
murmurs from the infinite sea, the sun's de- 
parting glory setting bright plates of moving 
14 



The TOWER. 

gold on the wavelets, the church towers and 
spires piercing the violet haze above the 
wharves and the great sea of homes and 
factories that lie behind them. What pageants 
of history, visible and invisible, have thy 
waters, O Thames, beheld? Did Julius 
Caesar, as he forded them on a foray at Brent- 
ford see. into thy future with his keen eye? 
Did More, that wise, sweet Chancellor of 
England, whom thy waters bore to do filial 
homage to his father upon the King's Bench 
of Justice, trace any way to Utopia along thy 
tide? Was Morris, lured up by thy stream 
from one Kelmscott to another, aware that the 
big Tragedy of Europe would so speed the 
coming of the Day for which he laboured, 
preaching in the rain, singing the " Song of 
the March Wind," praying over the grave of 
a boy killed in the riots of Bloody Sunday : 

Our friend who lies here has had a hard life and 
met with a hard death; and, if society had been differ- 
ently constituted, his life might have been a delightful, 
a beautiful, and a happy one. It is our business to begin 
to organise for the purpose of seeing that such things 
shall not happen, to try to make this earth a beautiful 
and happy place. 

As the sight of the River brought these 
imaginings resurgent to my mind, the ship that 
carried me soared like the dream-carpet of an 
Eastern tale upwards across the Parks to 
Hendon, and I think I was drowsily affected 
by my journey, for I was conscious of some 

15 



The TOWER. 

change come over the face of the metropolis 
and yet too tired to inquire upon it, well 
knowing that on the morrow I should be free 
to wander in the old haunts as I might wish. 
Our pilot brought us to earth with his skilled 
control, and as the waiting mechanics guided 
us to the aerodrome, I roused myself curiously 
to see where I was and how I should be lodged 
for the night. 

A small, serviceable vehicle, not unlike the 
invalid's " Bath chair " that made life tolerable 
for my great-aunt Clara, only lighter and with 
some air of Japan about it, glided towards me 
with a jolly youngster of a lad perched at the 
back of it upon a kind of bracket or dickey, 
from which his fingers played easily upon the 
stops of a board controlling the small storage 
of electric power. The badge on his tunic 
declared him to be of the same Service as the 
pilot of the aeroplane which had brought me 
from the coast, and the boy readily identified 
me for his passenger. Along the up-track 
centred in a main road between the horse- 
ways that divided foot-paths, we sped easily 
to — yes, to what I found I could still recog- 
nise, though now happily settled with a 
quality of decorous beauty that only wise 
town-planning could inherit, the comely town 
that they built north of the Heath courage- 
ously in the face of the sceptical and the 
cynical, St. Jude's spire of an artist-builder 
16 



The TOWER 

rising from the plateau in the midst of well- 
laid ways and abundant gardens, so that this 
suburb of the over-big Urbs or City proper 
took a new dignity for that name. 

My host, whom I had not met before, 
greeted me as my cheerful charioteer brought 
me to the door of a house on what I recognised 
as the side of Primrose Hill, and I wondered 
if I was in some scientific New Atlantis where 
all facilities are rendered gratis or where I 
should learn that the Commonwealth was so 
ordered that, to match Bellamy's " Looking 
Backward " or " Swiss Family Robinson," 
each citizen had nothing to pay and all to 
enjoy. But as I opened the handle of the car 
door for dismounting a disc rose with a note 
of my decimal fare, and as I paid it to the lad, 
without argument or addition, he pleasantly 
thanked me, and, as he wished me "Good- 
night," I noticed that he slipped the coins into 
a register at the side of his finger board. . . . 

I went to my rest early that night, aware 
both that some casual remarks of my host over 
the supper table gave me a zestful sense of 
anticipation which was indeed already satisfied 
by a few items about the house and that the 
morrow would show me some surprises in the 
great town. The dwelling itself, a well-built 
Victorian structure, quite familiar to me out- 
wardly, had undergone some magic within. I 
seemed to know that only some districts of 

17 

c 



The TOWER 

huge London had been destroyed in that awful 
week of conflagration when the desperate fury 
of the beaten foemen launched a storm of 
pitiless fire-bombs that put hundreds to an 
agonising death, and incidentally wrecked 
half Bayswater between Paddington and the 
Park, and gave the occasion for a dozen well- 
planned areas of rebuilding on both sides of 
the Thames. 

" Yes, 55 said my host, " we have been 
sensible enough to alter many ways and modes 
since the Catastrophe, as we call the War, was 
finished. I think the big Industrial Revolu- 
tion is chiefly responsible along unexpected 
lines. 55 

" How ?" said I, eager for a foretaste of 
my morrow 5 s discoveries. " Do you really 
mean that, after all, the tentative, wistful 
strivings of those whom age or responsibilities 
kept at home while the splendid lads faced the 
Hell in Europe, did achieve the revolution; 
did reconstruct and make some compensation 
even for the sacrifice? I so well remember 
how much we conferred and discussed with 
what at times seemed like babble when the 
news of action came in each day from the 
Front, and, as the Bishop said sorrowfully, 
" how little yet seems to come out of it ! 55 

" You shall see and hear for yourself in 
these coming days. To-night I only mean 
these things, 55 and his hands indicated the 
18 



The TOWER 

useful, better - made furniture we used, the 
service-lift in the corner of the transformed 
house which let his boys fetch the food as it 
came up from the kitchen, and, as I had found 
already, ran up usefully to the bedrooms 
above; the simple and more beautiful styles of 
dressing the walls, the electric toaster and 
other handy fittings, " these things, I do be- 
lieve, came along quite quietly and naturally, 
because Industry became autonomous and ex- 
changed old-fashioned ways for pay, and 
enjoys, as we have it, a sort of functional free- 
play, as our new economists call it." 
" I hardly understand you," I said. 
" You would not," he said, smiling. " And 
your journey will have made you drowsy. We 
all find that at night, though it means an ex- 
hilaration for the morrow's work. You will 
like to sleep." 

And the elder of his lads, a school-boy still as 
I found, led me to my room, and showed me 
the shutter fastenings and how I could operate 
them from the head of my bed in the morn- 
ing when a small bell would tell me that a cup 
of tea and shaving water were waiting in the 
lift cupboard off the dressing room. 



x 9 



C^l t^i t^> <^> C^3 t<^ C^l t^> t^> t^l t^S t^> t^5 t^> t^» t^» t^> «^» 

§IV. IN THE CHAPEL OF HEROIC 
SOULS 

IN the morning my host was astir early, 
attending to the motors and dynamos 
of the family wheels — the children's 
light " cycles," as they still called them, 
which bore them without strain over 
the easy gradients of the town on their ways 
to school as well as for excursions on the free 
home-days, and his own two-seated car, 
alternatively impelled by steam for longer 
journeys and contrived to generate its own 
electricity. Speedily he drove me down into 
the City, along the shining centre-track of 
the new Hendon Road which pierced its 
broad way between strange warehouses and 
workshops that struck me as remarkable in 
themselves and as usefully substituted round 
the Railway Termini for the ugly, perverted 
Bayswater and Paddington dwellings that I 
remembered from the days before the Great 
Fire. 

I was an hour too early to present at West - 
minster my credentials that I had found in my 
host's letter-locker at the neat little Pneumatic 
Post Office at the end of his road. So he put 
me off his car at Trafalgar Square, which 
I was not surprised to find at last laid out with 
a really beautiful formal garden of stone- work 
20 



The TOWER 

and evergreen trees, and fountains that per- 
petually gave out the peaceful liveliness of 
playing waters. 

A quite natural sense of calm, even amid 
the hum and roar of the traffic outside the 
great hedge that the trees provided, came from 
the tall central " Pillar of Sacrifice " (raised 
on the site where a gale had shattered the air- 
raid shaken Nelson Column) which I seemed 
to remember that the sculptor Gill and the 
architect Holden designed in the early years 
of the War as a memorial to Overseas Heroes. 
Upon the soaring column of a hundred 
and fifty feet, set upon a firm square base 
wherein was a chamber containing the names 
of the fallen inscribed on swinging panels, the 
majestic figure of Christ, with rested sword 
in pierced hands, gazed quietly down upon 
the world, triumphant over the death and suf- 
fering symbolised by his own crucified body 
carved in relief below. And in shallower 
relief, cut along a frieze of Hopton-Wood 
stone set between dark bands of Purbeck 
marble all round the base of the Pillar, and 
above long benches where flower-sellers 
were already beginning to set out their mer- 
chandise, I wondered at the portrayal of all 
those types of our manhood and womanhood 
that the bewildering catastrophe summoned 
willing to the warfare and its side-struggles 
— the Grenfells, Blackwoods, Listers, Butter ~ 

21 



The TOWER 

worths, Chavasses, Sidgwicks, and Brookes of 
every rank, and the Hoods and Cornwalls of 
the devoted Navy, the heroic Peels and 
Cavells of the chaplains and nurses, the 
Angells of every munition factory, the 
women on the land and in offices and banks 
— shown, with the true artist's Greek insight, 
not mangled, stiff, awkward, or inanimate, 
but exultant in their grace or strength, active, 
eager. . . . The only lettering, upon the 
front of this frieze, was the cry of mingled 
gratitude, humility and pride : — 

OUR SONS AND OUR DAUGHTERS 
WHO HAVE SHOWN US GOD. 

Had their service an4 oblation after all 
proved the beginnings of the New Life ? 

I walked to the River dov/n a new Mall, 
aware, as my fascinated gaze moved along the 
alert and briskly moving crowds of workers, 
along the pavements, that the great blot of 
Charing Cross Railway Station was abolished, 
and that, behind a wide and open public place 
and some half-concealed beautiful structure 
which divided the roadway, a broad new 
Bridge was flung across the Thames for 
London's use and adornment. 

As I approached this building, its meaning 
became inevitable — it was the Chapel of 
Heroic Souls where the masons and the 
carvers were still at work upon decorating 
its exterior, so sincere and patient was the 

22 



The TOWER 

wise desire to give only the very best of work - 
manship to it. I had not imagined my 
countrymen could produce anything so really 
beautiful as this shrine, and I can hardly 
describe it to you. It was as if the spirits of 
those old craftsmen of Northern France and 
Flanders and Italy and Bohemia, whose handi- 
work had been foully battered and murdered, 
had come, refugees to our island, to add 
their grateful inspiration to the craftsman- 
ship of our own artists. At least, the occasion 
and some wise controlling word must have 
conspired in an act of very noble and sustained 
commemoration. 

You will know that to assert its dignity 
among high modern city structures a small 
building must be ornate. This Chapel was 
ornate without fussiness, rich but not garish. 
Even in the quiet morning light its pinkish 
Norman stone, sent in tribute by France, 
glowed when you found it closely inside the 
circle of cypresses which both screened it from 
the city traffic and was of itself an object of 
beauty along the converging ways of Mall, 
Bridge and Embankment. It made me think 
of that lovely cloister of Sant' Ambrogio at 
Milan as I passed along the arcaded forecourt 
or atrium, where rest and meditation were at 
ease; and I was aware of some curious but 
eye-pleasing tables of mosaics set out with 
enamelled emblems and the golden names of 
2 3 



The TOWER 

regimental divisions and territorial battalions 
which, as I learned later, commemorated the 
chief acts and scenes of that terrible warfare 
in all Earth's continents. I think, however, 
that the only note of visible sadness in the 
whole building came from the pathetic dignity 
of the three Fates seated in the calm of their 
marble under the canopy of the deep-set porch 
of entrance, impressive with their gracious 
austerity, kindly divine women, dividing the 
eternal task of mortality, invincible to all 
comers, unfriendly to none but the cowardly 
and the unjust. 

Within, this cruciform Temple had a mode 
of its own, fashioned not for preaching or 
massed congregation, but for commemora- 
tion and reflection. Its wings or transepts 
were not smaller than what we called the nave 
or chancel; but the decoration of the walls 
and roofs and the up-lift of the stairways 
which, on left and right, led up to the high 
altar as at San Miniato above Florence or, in 
a way, in our own Wimborne Minster, en- 
tirely dispelled any sense of uniformity. I 
could not see the shrine or altar-table. The 
lighting seemed to come, not by the few and 
narrow windows which were filled with very 
rich and beautiful glass, but upwards from the 
open pavement of the floor, on which there 
were only a few benches of carved stone, and 
along which the open doorways threw shafts 
24 



The TOWER 
of sunshine. More light came downwards 
from a concealed clerestory below the dome. 
I have hinted that the sculptors and masons, 
men trained, as I guess, in the varying 
schools of Frampton and Gill and Derwent 
Wood, had vied in making the exterior of 
this Chapel rich with suggestion of the stimu- 
lating heroism of saintly men and women. 
Within, the only figures obvious to the eye 
were four. The walls were lovely with a 
scheme of blue and silver and some black, but 
across the chancel and half-way up the altar- 
stairs was set a gorgeous screen of painted 
wood which reminded me of a deserted church 
in the Breton hills. Its panels were distinct 
with figures and emblems symbolising the 
chief relations, crises and aspirations of human 
life, cunningly bordered and linked up with 
the representation of all animal and vegetable 
nature. Over the central arch of this screen, 
in three niches, stood three Divine Mothers 
in whom mankind in its highest moods has 
worshipped the ideas of love, mercy and con- 
solation. On the left Demeter, the bountiful, 
kindly Greek Mother of the South, soft with 
recurrent grief for her lost Persephone; in 
the centre, Mary, the Christian Mother of the 
pure-souled Jesus, who leavened the whole 
world with his secret methods of sweet- 
reasonableness and altruism; on the right the 
Buddhist Kuanyim, the charitable guardian 
25 



The TOWER 

of hoping mothers and tender infants, her 
face turned northwards to contemplate the 
distresses of the cold world. Hung above 
them, too remote whether in the altitude of 
the Chapel's height or in the distance from 
the time of his Passion for us to feel sensibly 
the poignant tragedy of his limbs that sagged 
upon the cruel Cross, the form of Jesus de- 
clared the issue to which he at least, in 
the Syrian story, was willing to push the test 
of all that he taught to be the real wealth- - 
Grace, Peace, Living Water, Bread of Life, 
the Kingdom of God, all that in right living 
was brimful of promise and of joy. A 
mystery perhaps, but who is to say whether 
such a saint died rather for all those whom 
this Chapel honoured, or they for him ? 

And high above this screen and the lighting 
gallery which I spoke of, was lifted a dome 
which soared in the worship of its own con- 
ception, although physically of no great 
height. For the writing in great letters along 
a frieze beneath it declared the Praise of God, 
that great Majesty and Power outside us, not 
ourselves, that is, as some would say, finite 
like Man and yet is surely somehow infinite : 

The heavens are telling Jehovah's glory, the sounding 
spheres His power proclaim; the earth, the oceans, are 
loud with the story; revere, O man, His awful name! 
To Him the stars their homage render, He clothes the 
sun with beams of gold; when high in heaven He 
laughs in His splendour, and runs His course, a giant 
bold. 26 



The TOWER 

For God, whom we must need love for 
what He is and not only for what He is try- 
ing to do, is indeed an artist as well as a 
philanthropist. Men and women instinc- 
tively know that, and therefore need the praise 
of art for declaring nature. Thus, here in 
the dome itself, so that I knew instinctively 
that human artists like Cayley Robinson and 
Henry Wilson and their followers must have 
designed the brilliant and yet severe scheme 
of celestial loveliness above the tree-tops and 
the birds, was a Vision of Beauty above all 
seen and measurable things. . . . 

It was a needed relief, before walking out 
into the hum and stir of the world, to read 
the comfortable words that ran in gold letter- 
ing over the green bird-and-fish embroidered 
hangings which, except for a few cunningly 
wrought lamp-holders, were the only orna- 
ment beneath the calm loveliness of the walls, 
the comfort of 

Those thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
And with their mild persistence urge man's search 
To vaster issues. 

For here I read : 

Men must love the creation they work in the midst of, 

and what St. Thomas a Kempis said : 

If a man would but take notice what peace he brings 
to himself and what joy to others merely by managing 
himself rightly. 

And again what St. Paul said : 
27 



The TOWER 

We are saved by hope, but hope that is seen is not 
hope. 

And Mazzini : 

I love Jesus as the man who has loved the most of all 
mankind, servants and masters, rich and poor, Brahmins 
and Helots or Parias. 

And Bacon : 

A little natural philosophy and the first entrance into 
it inclines men's opinions to Atheism, but, on the other 
hand, natural philosophy and wading into it brings 
men's minds about again to religion. 

And Joubert : 

Piety is not a religion, although it is the soul of all 
religions. . . . Religion is neither a theology nor 
a theosophy; it is more than that, it is a discipline, a 
law, a yoke, an indissoluble engagement. It must be 
loved as a kind of country and nursing mother. 

And St. James : 

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the 
Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their 
affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world. 

And among the inscribed sayings of Jesus 
that one which the sands of Egypt, as I re- 
called in my own time, restored to his Book 
of Testament : 

Wherever there is one alone, I am with him. Raise 
the stone and there shalt thou find me; cleave the 
wood, and there am I. 

As I read them, a strong, kindly voice said 
quietly at my ear (for there happened at that 
hour to be none at prayer in the Chapel) : 

" You seem, stranger, to be admiring our 
Holy Place ? " 

28 



The TOWER 

I turned and faced a tall and elderly man 
whom at once I knew to be a Priest in his 
dark gown, erect as a soldier, one empty sleeve 
pinned to his breast, his countenance that of 
a practical mystic, a friendly man and attrac- 
tive. 

" I think that it seems a holy place beyond 
what I would have expected out of an age 
inheriting the divergent and chaotic notions 
of my generation. For just before the Cata- 
strophe the religious men and women, those 
whom I should call religious," I said smiling, 
" were almost few and desperate, except that 
their faith told them to wait patiently. Our 
leaders seemed unable to guide even them- 
selves. There was trouble at St. Paul's, 
where a Dean said, c No Christian can be a 
pessimist,' and a Canon affirmed that c We of 
the Church of England cannot be optimists.' 
Here and there a voice would bravely plead 
for a unity among the Christian churches — 
Anglican, Nonconformist, and Roman — 
temples of one Master's faith. The Quakers > 
as always, remained consistent and Christ- 
faithful. But while plain men and women 
found few shepherds, and heard wise ethics 
preached by Positivists and Theosophists and 
Rationalists, it was hard to say why Christian 
England was so un-Christian or what should 
survive in Europe and the new World as a 
living faith for stern men and tender women, 
29 



The TOWER 

a fire to keep example alive which goes out 
if not communicated, a gentle force nourish- 
ing virtue which will else be starved, and wed- 
ding humility to devotion which without it 
must become pride. And yet- " 

" Yes ? " said the Priest. 

" Why," said I, " I do remember that in 
the War-time, as if to redeem us from some 
of its horror, there was everywhere at home 
a kind of welling-up of little kindly and civil 
acts and thoughts — men and women, half con- 
scious of their boys' sacrifice abroad, almost 
surprising themselves into courtesy, for- 
bearance, helpfulness, so that, if you will 
understand me, the opposite acts were re- 
marked and rebuked, being rare." 

" Yes," said the other, and I saw that, while 
erect, he was an old man and wise. " I think 
I know, for I remember — I was hurt in Flan- 
ders, badly at Hollebeke east of Ypres, bomb- 
ing a blockhouse, and came home invalid, and 
after a while, like many others, as you know, 
perhaps, became a priest to see if I could 
help." He paused, as if remembering some 
things renounced, but not sadly. " I knew- 
what the return from the warfare would in- 
volve — a stream of weary, eager, struggling, 
broken men, and it nearly deluged and dis- 
mayed us at one time, only the women were 
splendid. . . . 

" But I must not keep you. I only mean 
30 



The TOWER 

that, somehow and how else than by the 
grace of God, the divine impulse was, as ever, 
at work, what both Darwin and Newman 
believed in. We were bound to have it, and 
it was our part to direct it right, for the hearts 
of men and women were full of it, and not 
even the formalists and the pedants, 55 and T 
saw this priest-soldier 5 s eyes brighten, " could 
stay it. 55 

" And how, 55 I said, " do you mean ? 55 

" Well, briefly, that after the purging of 
the war-time and the dreadful scars which men 
endured, our society was thirsty for the com- 
fort and conciliation which, socially, can only 
come enduringly from religion. In so great 
a welter of the provisional and the relative, 
something absolute and permanent was man's 
greatest need. And the religious impulse 
which alone could have enabled us to do what 
has been done (ah ! I think you have not seen 
it yet, but you will), drove us all to see that it 
is religion which is the affirmation of abso- 
lute values, and, as Brock put it in our time, 
when it becomes fully conscious, the affirma- 
tion of the absolute value of God Himself. 55 

" But, 55 I asked, " did the community, folk 
in general, find this out and hold by it ? 55 

" Yes, indeed; indeed they did, as they were 

bound to. I cannot tell you the whole story, 

but I cannot too thankfully assure you that it 

came from within and not from without. Of 

3? 



The TOWER 

course wise teaching helped. Parliament was 
so busy that it was sensibly persuaded to give 
the Church power to legislate on all matters 
affecting the Church, subject to Parliament- 
ary veto, and so we remodelled all her frame- 
work, nine new Provinces, divided into old 
and new dioceses, and the offences of * fat ' 
and vendible livings abolished. The Psalter, 
at least for public services, dropped many 
offensive and cruel psalms, and received a 
welcome correction of old blemishes, as in the 
lovely 23rd and that more familiar song of 
pilgrimage, the 95th. The Prayer Book, 
three centuries old, received new prayers and 
hymns and litanies, apt for new realms of 
thought and new occupations of life. Our 
priesthood, immensely more tolerant and free, 
was not afraid to preach the Christ in every 
stone and tree, in Athene and in Amida too. 
If Jesus was born in Syria, he might, as some 
said, have been born in China or in Gaul, and 
would have used the same secret and method, 
but with the phrases and parables of another 
people. By thus ministering to a most de- 
sirable freedom and variety, the living past 
has been saved for the future. Rich tradi- 
tions of order and forms have been preserved 
without damage to the eager spirit of inquiry 
and to that faith in progressive revelation 
which makes religion for the truly religious 
man an adventure — -an adventure, and not the 
.32 



The TOWER 

rather mean investment which our forefathers, 
in their pathetic blindness, made of it." 

" And so you mean that this Holy Place is 
really the voice of the people ? " I asked in 
wonder. 

" Yes, I mean that, 55 he gratefully replied. 
" They have found what Mazzini knew, that 
bare ethics was not enough, that no morality 
can endure or bring forth life, without a 
heaven and dogma to support it, 55 and his 
eyes wandered to the dome and the screen 
beneath it. " Yes, I think it was in a letter 
to a dear friend that the great Italian depre- 
cated too much self-analysis, *■ thinking too 
much of our salvation. Let God think of it. 
Love Him in a simple, unexacting, unscrutin- 
ising way, as a child his mother. 5 To work 
and worship together in such love is, simply, 
our creed — whether our ideals are those of the 
First or the Sixteenth or the Twentieth Cen- 
tury ! Our laity, thanks be to God 5 s power, 
see that now for themselves, and hardly need 
our craft. Society is more complex than ever. 
Our long history grows daily longer. And 
our Church, as she should, keeps her bounds 
ever wider and wider in the search for God 
and for what Green of Oxford called that 
eternal relationship between God and man 
bringing a new insight into the things of God 
and a new energy of love." 

We stood in silence, as he knew that, to my 
33 

D 



The TOWER 
shame, I was not quite credulous. The morn- 
ing sun streamed in and through the open 
doors came the hum of traffic. Quietly a few 
citizens were entering for brief worship on 
their way to work. 

" Believe me," said this man of comfort 
and experience, as he took me by the hand, 
" you will find on your journey in our hap- 
pier island that I have told you the truth. 
You will not find Utopia, which is Nowhere. 
You will still find men and women, with their 
loves and passions, their envies and their 
zeals, their joys and their griefs, their qualities 
and traits more varied than the sands of the 
shore. You will find public and private life 
as complex and wonderful as ever. Even the 
Catastrophe was only an episode. The great 
drama goes on and on. But I think you will 
find the life a whole tone richer, stamped with 
a character more just and healthy, and our 
island thus happier. Yes; I behold England 
as a Tower in the deep, a strong place upon 
which a banner floats in the breezes that come 
from the encircling sea; a Tower with bridges 
for access to its treasured wisdom, gates and 
doorways for the carrying of counsel and help, 
a Tower under whose walls a juster indus- 
trialism employs the thousands of our workers, 
and across whose broad uplands and wide 
forests a vigorous peasantry once more lives 
with nature in the fear of God, so that our 
34 



The TOWER 

land is envied and praised beyond the seas." 
" And shall I see this England ? " said I. 
" Yes, I think you will. God speed you," 

he said. 

And I left him, heartened for my journey. 



35 



t^»t^> tffi* t^> t^> t^> t^> t^» t^> t^> t^> t^> trf^ t^> t^> t^» t^> t^> 

§V. A JUSTER INDUSTRIALISM 

t^lt^) C^> C^> t^> t^» t^ t^> t^i t^> t^> t^> t^> t^> t^> L&* t^> t^> 

AS I walked Westminster way by 
the river I could not but linger 
with relief to watch thephysical life 
on the tide, the lighters which still, 
as in my own proper day and in that 
older time when Dr. Johnson and the ferry-boy 
spoke of Argonauts, and further back still in 
i he days of Queen Bess, carried merchandise 
along the stream. The Chapel and the Priest 
had been deeply moving, and my spirit was 
hardly prepared. I should take my time. . . . 
I had made some slip of judgment in think- 
ing that I should grasp the new Revolution in 
Industry which was my quest without gaug- 
ing its sanction, the soul of its success. 
For, not unnaturally, I seemed, cautiously, 
to expect only some faint and slow remedies 
for the old labour-strife. The very river re- 
called that nice saying of old Selden : 

In a troubled state we must do as in foul weather 
upon the Thames, not think to cut directly through, 
so that the boat may be quickly full of water, but rise 
and fall as the waves do, give as much as conveniently 
we can — 

and yet the cheerful countenances and zestful 
gait of the workers whom I saw about me 
promised some deeper fulfilment of my hope. 

36 



The TOWER 

I hardly know how to convey to you a just 
notion of their state — the healthier looks, the 
springing carriage of their limbs, the easy 
camaraderie of the sexes (like children in a 
co-educational school grown big), a pervading 
but quite unobtrusive sense of fellow-citizen- 
ship such as they must have had in old Athens 
when there was only one kind of seat in the 
People's Theatre, saving those of the Priests 
of Dionysus. Their dress matched their 
moods. Aware of a great change, you hardly 
touched its meaning unless you could, curi- 
ously, finger its quality — the finer cloth and 
sensible cutting of the men's garb, their tunics 
and knee-breeches, no stranger to me than the 
odd Victorian modes would have been to a 
visitor from Chaucer's or Shakespeare's day; 
the pretty richness and varied elegance of the 
gowns which the women and maidens wore 
who were out at this hour of the morning. I 
had seen a foretaste of it all in the clothes of 
my host's children, little reckoning that their 
elders also shared the comfort and sanity of 
good workmanship and quality in their dress, 
reflecting a social cleanliness in their neat 
spruceness, their metal ornaments and jewel- 
lery few and good as in Holbein's portraits, 
only more popular. 

But I was only so aware of all this as to 
recollect it later, as a kind of product from the 
great and deep changes which the day taught 
37 



The TOWER 

me. My card showed me that I was over-due 
for my appointment at the Ministry of 
Commerce. 

The officer who received me gave me the air 
of a college friend of my own youth grown 
middle-aged in the Civil Service (as we used 
to call it), but without that too early loss of 
freshness and idealism which came from exces- 
sive scholarship-hunting. 

" You come, I believe, sir," he said, " on a 
visit from an earlier time, and I little know 
what you expect to find in our Labour 
arrangements." 

" I am now wise enough," said I, " to 
expect only what I shall see. In my day there 
was outward chaos to the eye — State control 
in unexpected places, plunderous profiteering 
in the essentials of life, well-meaning pro- 
moters of profit-sharing schemes, syndicalism 
and ugly threats of sabotage, co-partnership 
efforts yielding to ulterior motives and salved 
with difficulty, charters for 'conscription of 
wealth and £i a day, 5 the National Guild 
builders, the prevailing joint stock companies 
for purchasing labour at what a managing 
teemsman could secure it for, the little private 
trades, the small workshops! Do you have 
them all still ? Or did some good increasing 
purpose survive and bring a measure of order 
out of it all?" 

I almost hung upon his answer, for I had 

38 



The TOWER 
wondered for what the fearful price of the 
War-catastrophe had been paid. He seemed 
to divine my meaning and answered me a little 
cautiously. 

" I hope that you will not think that we 
have organised one panacea — secured a big, 
dull, uniform formula for all production. 
Thank Humanity, we have not achieved that 
yet," said this Bright-witted public servant. 

I was not really disappointed and tried to 
show my relief, whereat he smiled. 

" It is a long story, 55 he went on, " and of 
course I just do not remember the War myself, 
but recognise your own description from my 
reading. Are you free to spend the day wi th me ? ' 

"How?" said I. 

" I mean that you came a little late, and as 
we have only a small staff here in the Ministry 

I cannot depute my errand, which is at " 

and he named one of the big Midland towns 
which, if I may for once speak a hard word of 
my own generation, had sinned notoriously in 
sheer profit-seeking and hard bargain-driving. 
" I leave in half an hour by the mail-van. 55 

" By the mail- van ? 55 I queried. 

" Yes, 55 he said. " They are state-coaches, 
you see, well-equipped and rapid, so that at 
any time a state-officer (and we only have some 
hundreds where you had thousands) may ride 
on one and take an accredited passenger for 
company. Will you come ?" 

39 



The TOWER 
" Indeed I will," I answered readily. 
" And then I can tell you the tale and per- 
haps answer your queries, and, if I dispose of 
my business with the Trade Council easily, as 
I expect, will show you the labour shops on the 



As we sped up and out of London on to the 
Great North Road, my companion, when we 
were free from the thicker traffic and the car's 
engines were running well, told me a tale of 
interest — the more so because it was not a set 
tale, neither a Report nor a Theory, good as 
those may be in their places. 

" Yes, this car is a good product. You see, 
it really is not empty island-boasting to say 
that the British artisan remains the finest 
craftsman in the world, especially as he nowa- 
days has regained so much liberty to obey his 
instincts. < He will make good things 
supremely well; evil things he will reject ' — 
that's broadly true, and was well said. 

" Of course, the great chance came with the 
ending of the War. Perhaps God meant it so ! 
— I am not a theologian. I mean, the terrible 
destruction by the warfare and the absorption 
of non-fighting labour into making the myriad 
means of that destruction, emptied the stocks 
and supplies of the world's made things. 
Those were big and potent facts which I be- 
lieve they hardly realised at the time — and 
40 



The TOWER 

little wonder, with the world such a hell, 
Justice and Liberty walking, as the brave 
Irishman said, almost on bare feet, over its 
flaming coals. . . . 

" Those were big facts, I say. And another 
was the very right arid proper un-dilution of 
labour which came after the War. At one end 
the old workers (all honour to them for the 
added toil which they had taken on in the 
workshops at home) were pensioned earlier, 
first at sixty-five and now at sixty." 

I showed my surprise. 

" It is humane. Yes, generally it is 
economic as well— the army of industry, like 
any other army, can travel no faster than its 
slowest arm, and, to speak frankly, why should 
society deny to an engine-driver or a printer 
what it used to claim from a schoolmaster and 
a civil servant ? But, above all, it is humane 
and rational, especially if you make the pen- 
sion voluntary and various, as the Danes saw 
and did long ago." 

We drew slow and careful at some cross- 
roads and then sped on. 

" At the other end (as perhaps you know ?) 
the return of the soldiers and sailors was the 
opportunity for the boys and girls, and we 
were wise enough to make Parliament seize it. 
The far-reaching evils of the too early em- 
ployment of children — your lad of fifteen in 
a grinding office or wasted on a van's tail- 

41 



The TOWER 

board, the little maids of England become 
premature women in factory life — were 
terrible, the harder to check because the bonds 
of the slavery were invisible, intangible. 
Routine, strife, excitement, and routine — all 
enemies to the joy of youth, the expansion of 
soul, body, and mind, the discovery of special 
aptitude and capacity. God be praised that 
we caught His better wisdom at that time and 
that our leaders were listened to." 

"And with what result?" I asked, much 
stirred by this brief narrative of such big- 
matters. " Do you mean you have achieved 
some industrial paradise by such surgery?" 

" Hardly," said he. " We are still human, 
and sinners too ! I suppose we shall be terribly 
dull when we are all saints. But, seriously, 
the fabric of a new and better industrial order 
has been achieved. I am sure of it, and I feel 
you, stranger, will be even more conscious of 
it than we who live with it daily. Come, you 
have let me do all the talking. How would 
you guess that we have achieved what I ask 
you to believe?" 

I suppose that I was too wise to answer 
hastily or with any certain, single guess. 
Presently I said : 

" Industrial reform had many friends in my 

day, and they differed wonderfully in their 

counsels. Some worked for the millennium, 

some for next week. Some fixed their faith, 

42 



The TOWER 

and with good reason, in small workshops 
where, as for fine, strong furniture or good 
clothing, the producer met his consumer across 
the bench or counter. Some, with good 
reason, too, declared that economy in the pur- 
chase of materials and the disposing of pro- 
ducts was, as for electric lamps, pencils, and a 
thousand articles, test attained by large factory 
organisation, what you might call the princi- 
palities and powers of Industry, with the 
Rulers and the Governed and a goodly com- 
pany of Managing Officers — if only you could 
avoid promotion parasites and their expenses. 
And then, after the manner of our country- 
men, with even more disputation, in our 
British fashion, about the Names than the 
Things themselves, there would be the con- 
tinual debate about Capital and Labour — lead- 
ing off into the weighing of the respective 
merits and defects of Partnership and Profit- 
sharing, with a curious bye-quarrel engendered 
by some unhappy second meaning earned for 
the primarily honest label of Co-Partnership 
itself ! Indeed, I would like to know the out- 
come of it all, for, like yourself, I know that 
the time we speak of was big with change and 
large movements close to the birth. 55 

"Well? 55 he said. 

" I mean that Morris himself, whom folks 
charged with an idle hankering after the days 
of Chaucer, knew well that, however grate- 

43 



The TOWER 

fully we would like that happier time to 
return, it was our business to march breast 
forward with what the world now offered — 
that men cannot all play St. Francis or Thoreau 
in Walden. As the records of your Ministry, 
indeed, your own school-books, if they are 
sensible, will have told you, the century end- 
ing with the Catastrophe was, as regards the 
fields of our home-labour, in both town and 
countryside, a theatre of strange antagonism, 
coercion and resistance. It was marked chiefly 
by the strangest anomalies of wealth and 
poverty in all the outward aspects of life. In- 
wardly, its character was that of prolonged and 
ill-suppressed bitterness of class-estrangement, 
an odd falling-away in religion, an extravagant 
fever for luxuries, redeemed by the courage of 
most of the poor and the charity of some of 
the rich, saved by the divine in everything 
human." 

" And do you attribute the War to that, as 
a kind of explosion or outbreak of the 
malady ? " said my companion. 

" Frankly, I do not know. I am rather 
concerned with the symptoms. We were all 
terribly ill at ease with a dozen remedies, 
rather than consciously preventing the malady. 
Strikes and threats of strikes were becoming 
the condition of all labour difficulty. Threats 
of stupid sabotage and "ca' canny," and almost 
a chronic interference of Parliament which 
44 



The TOWER 
would have been humorous if it had not been 
so paralysing — a baffling kind of control by 
anxious and well-meaning politicians, who, 
without intending it, and to the impotent dis- 
may of their victims, made a prey of Labour, 
so that the working men of England not un- 
naturally caught a big distrust of politics." 

" It was not only natural," said my State- 
officer friend, who had obviously earned his 
post by insight and acumen, " it was rational. 
The blunder which Labour made as the Nine- 
teenth Century closed and even later was to 
put political before economical power. The 
mistake was all the worse a blunder for being 
made when the religious impulses of our social 
life had ebbed very low." 

" Well," I asked, " will you now tell me the 
outcome ? Did the big factories win or the 
little workshops ? " 

" Both," he said, " and I think you will 
guess what happened if I tell you that the 
larger co-operative concerns came first, and 
out of them, the desirable small shops you will 
find in plenty." 

" How do you mean ? " I asked, puzzled. 

" With what your generation had produced 
you would hardly expect to find the giant 
factories slain by the little shops in a day. 
After all, David's pebble at Goliath was a 
lucky accident! We were unlikely to win 
back at a bound to so simple an idea, and for 

45 



The TOWER 

some of life's obvious necessities, coal and 
milk, for instances, and for trades like trans- 
port and engineering, other formulas will be 
essential. But the real solvent of industrial 
strife which we seem to have found was what 
produced happier and more contented 
labourers. Happier labourers meant men and 
women readier to make even simple good 
things of a high standard, away from the stunt- 
ing and deadening influences of processes and 
divided industries, things more lasting and 
with a sounder quality acceptable to shrewd 
consumers. It meant that those who produced 
were readier to take the risks of the adventure 
of themselves selling what they fashioned in 
actual contact with those that wanted their pro- 
ducts. Yes, that was the key — freedom to 
enjoy risks, not a slavery to avoid them; and a 
freedom amid pleasanter surroundings of 
homes and leisure. Why, it meant art or work - 
pleasure once more restored to industry. It 
meant a kind of instinct in people, no longer 
chained in unseen shackles to painful overtime 
work for a living wage, for doing the best they 
could with the work in hand, for making 
bread, boots, chairs, printing, and all else ex- 
cellent of its kind." 

" You surely do not mean," I asked, almost 
incredulously, " that what Morris prophesied 
has actually come about ? I seem to remember 
something very like that." 

4 6 



The TOWER 

" Indeed I do — for I suppose I was quoting 
him from memory, that man whom his friend 
called c a rock of defence to us all and a castle 
on the top of it, and a banner on the top of 
that.' " 

" You have not told me how it came about," 
I eagerly questioned. " Was it by Act of Par- 
liament ? " I said, foolishly enough. 

" Gra'mercy, no ! " chuckled my friend. 
" The quality of industrial justice is not 
strained. It comes gently, along the runnels 
of mutual confidence, welling up from the 
fountains of decency and fairness and good- 
will. Of course, as you may believe, those 
springs sometimes get poisoned by envy and 
greed, the channels choked by sloth and in- 
fidelity. But in the main we have, since the 
Catastrophe purged us and gave us a new 
wisdom with the fear of God, achieved in very 
great measure an intimate and continuous 
association of management and labour — 
greater, if less heroic, than the brotherhood in 
the awful trenches of that ordeal by battle 
with which our champions redeemed 
calamity." 

" Association," I said. " You mean part- 
nership, after all ? " 

" Well, yes, in a sense; but partnership is at 

best a vague term when you apply it to more 

than two or three human spirits. We haven't 

invented a better Word than Association for 

47 



The TOWER 

signifying all that the alliance of all in an 
industry aims at." 

" That aim ? " I queried. 

" The aim, if you look at it steadily and 
honestly, is simple enough. It always has 
been, though so often lost in dust of strife and 
mists of fraud. There was a straight question 
put in our time by a Judge, an eminent lawyer, 
who with a curiously lucid and incisive mind 
had himself taken a leading part in the formu- 
lation and practice of the law of joint-stock 
companies. This was Buckley, who became 
Lord Wrenbury, and when the public were 
sick with anxiety and dread about the antagon- 
ism between Capital and Labour, stated openly 
that it was principally because while both em- 
ployer and employed contribute to production, 
the thing produced belonged to the employer 
to the exclusion of the employed — a fact, as 
he explained, that lay at the root of all in- 
dustrial discontent." 

" Yes," I said; " I remember. And I expect 
it must have been a familiar, haunting thought 
to him and any others, judges, lawyers, and 
clerks of any imagination, who either had to 
do with the promotion schemes and the big 
* nominal capital ' of commissions and dis- 
counts and other so-called services that were 
superadded to the actual, necessary capital of 
money, machinery and material, or, on Tues- 
days in the Law Courts, attended at the 
48 



The TOWER 
obsequies of wound-up companies without 
much thought of the discharged labourers 
themselves." 

" I think it went further than that," said 
my companion, with the air of a man whose 
intelligence read deep. " As we have come 
round to a better time I won't waste words 
or blame about absentee-employers or the 
slavery of Capital — and, after all, sarcasm 
never pays in a world that is meant to be cheer- 
ful and full of good spirits. But, broadly put, 
the deplorable result of the last century's in- 
ventions in finance meant that men and women 
who had funds which they inherited or saved 
or gained, virtually surrendered their control 
of the quota which they invested in a vast and 
complicated system. Small quantities were 
contributed to huge funds. But far over their 
heads great financial houses floated loans or 
dealt in great Modes of shares. Banks turned 
on the taps of cash into concerns whose sound- 
ness was not measured in terms of honesty or 
fair dealing. Insurance corporations built up 
huge reserves of property, hoping thus to 
abolish risks and defy the blows of fortune. 
The whole system (which bridged seas and 
oceans so that you could have traced the rise 
of prices in England to the frauds of Ameri- 
can railway magnates) became too complex to 
be grasped or controlled. Stockbrokers, 
occupied with the mere business of transfer- 

49 



The TOWER 

ring the contributions of the amateur investor 
to the working Capitalist, became, let us hope 
unconsciously, the agents of a very dark 
Power ! Few either outside or within an in- 
surance society really knew whether its funds 
were invested in industries whose labour was 
underpaid, or its prosperity based on profits a 
larger share of which, in natural justice, 
belonged to the labourer. Your shipping firms 
might treat their men fairly, but were they 
carrying and distributing sweated goods? 
You cannot deny such broad statements, or 
that, to be quite honest, they involved a vast 
moral problem — a question, that is, of men, 
women, and children versus balance sheets and 
dividends. And, fortunately, just before the 
World-catastrophe, the huge fallacy was 
realised just in so far as the People were edu- 
cated (which is why Russia brought her liberty 
to birth with such slow and tortuous agony) 

"Yes, it was and always will be a moral 
question. Your Lord Wrenbury knew it 
when he declared that that man would have 
solved the problem who found the way to give 
the unemployed upon commercial principles a 
share and interest in the thing produced, and 
sounded Labour's own death-knell to the 
Freedom-to-buy-and-sell-labour which the old 
* Industrial Revolution ' had claimed and prac- 
tised." 

5° 



The TOWER 

" This," I said, beginning to see the drift of 
his argument, which certainly accorded well 
with the busy and cheerful aspect of the new 
towns and the revived country-side through 
which we sped, " is a Big matter." 

" Of course it is," said he. " It is the big 
matter for our life as a society — everything 
between bread-and-butter and religion, and 
those included, is involved in it." 

" Do you mean that there are no longer any 
financial houses or banks or insurance com- 
panies ? " I asked. 

" No, but they are wonderfully different, 
and all brought very much nearer to the 
sources of Production and the workshops of 
Labour, and in that sense the c commercial 
principles ' stated in the Wrenbury formula 
(for which he was unfairly suspected by some 
of his intransigeant critics) have been, as they 
were bound to be, observed." 

" I suppose you mean that mere profit-shar- 
ing and co-partnery have not sufftced ? " 

" No. They were, as your generation tried 
them, palliatives at the best, and here and there 
a fraud. Owen and Maurice (all honour to them 
for declaring war on the mere steam-engine 
capitalist hammer!) began these palliatives, 
with good intentions but feeble results. They 
miscalculated the mobility of both capital and 
artisan-intelligence. They under-estimated 
the dominant values of the human element 

5* 



The TOWER 

in associated labour. The wholly special basis 
of the State-regulated gas companies was an 
exception to prove the rule that l a gift from 
the employer ' is not < a share and interest in 
the thing produced,' and, with a fatal iteration 
in one form or another, the return for extra 
exertions stipulated in co-partnership schemes 
was found to be determined by factors over 
which the employed had no control or was 
frustrated by the removal or death of the 
worker. It was heart-breaking to entirely dis- 
interested advocates of profit-sharing to find 
the forces of a commercialism based on the 
unmoral system of your century too much for 
them. But while daring to begin on the right 
lines, they lacked the courage to go far 
enough. Labour wanted the full volume of 
their intellectual support — to discover that 
freedom is a vain thing without economic 
power. Only by a real responsibility based on 
economic power (not by being allowed a few 
shares among thousands) was Labour — the 
mass, that is, of skilled and unskilled artisans 
— likely to rise to a sense of liability against 
loss and fluctuations. Charged with this re- 
sponsibility, and wisely directed in their sense 
of it, workers have come to have no use for 
envy and injured feelings and all that Revolt 
feeds on. The new social contract is one to 
which a valuation of human life and the spirit 
of freedom have been restored. The change 
52 



The TOWER 
is the outcome of a moral revolution, and, if 
you like, the War certainly helped to engender 
it." 

" Then I suppose you mean that Trade 
Unionism did become Industrial Union- 
ism ? " I asked. " I remember the beginning 
of the tide, and how it came in by unexpected 
channels." 

" Yes, in a great measure it is that," he 
replied, " although naturally many workers, 
especially the more artistic craftsmen, who 
under the welcome new industrial freedom 
have increased in numbers, hold out for their 
own independence both in production and in 
marketing. But the large industries, from 
transport and mining to cotton-spinning and 
potteries, are each organised in their own 
National Guilds as a kind of true equipoise to 
the State, sixteen or seventeen of them in all, 
and not over a hundred trades, as of old. 
Each Guild includes all workers of every 
grade in the industry it covers, co-operating 
with the State as the seat of spiritual functions 
for the benefit of the community as a whole, 
but based on voluntary organisation and 
democratic management. And above all, as 
the Guild, by democratic vote, decides the 
conditions of labour and the hours of work 
upon a basis of mutuality suitable for its own 
trade, it is responsible for the material wel- 
fare of its members, and indeed solves the 

S3 



The TOWER 

problem of unemployment by preventing it." 
" Will you tell me what you mean, for I 
suppose capital funds are as much wanted as 
ever, and I am eager to know what has hap- 
pened to all the middle-class investors who 
were born in the nineteenth century. 55 

" I will tell you something after we have 
walked about Chesterfield to stretch our legs 
a little, for we shall stop here a while, and we 
shall be pretty weary, body and mind, by our 
journey 5 s end. To-morrow I advise you to 
walk round the New Town at Skipton. I 
have to return myself. 55 

It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was 
aware once more of a new and at first in- 
definable zest in the exposed citizenship of 
the place, akin to what I have felt in London. 
Here, of course, the life of the dwellers was 
much more directly against a productive 
background. The very dress of the workers 
showed it; their hands, as I observed, were 
those of enginemen, cokemen, mechanics, and 
all the other followers, whether at the face or 
in the pits, of the calling which in a coalfield 
wins the " black diamonds 55 of industry. 
They were the men whom, with varying racial 
characteristics, I had known in the England of 
my own time from Durham through to Wales, 
but their countenances and the gait and cheer- 
fulness of their womenfolk and the children 
were such as I bitterly remembered never to 
54 



The TOWER 
have seen in those ruined and hideous mis- 
housed and slavish hordes among the South 
Welsh valleys of my day. . . . 

" You must know," said my guide, " that 
this huge coal industry has not only been put 
on a new economic basis. That, of course, 
was the natural outcome of the rights which 
the miners secured from Parliament in your 
time — like the right to conduct their own 
case collectively at inquiries upon colliery 
disasters and the right to appoint checkway- 
men and even visiting inspectors." 

" Why, yes," I said, " I do remember that 
here in Derbyshire the men even persuaded 
the private owners to set up a joint committee 
with power to deal not only with absenteeism 
but also with questions of discipline and 
management." 

" Truly," he said, " and you shall hear of 
the logical outcome of that. But, first, I do 
want you to know something a little startling, 
that you may understand to what the new 
ownership and working of the mines are 
directed. Broadly, not a scuttle of the 
precious stuff is burned in a British house- 
hold." 

He smiled at my incredulous looks. 

" The trained intelligence that came into the 

working by miners of these State-owned mines 

saw to that. Science has told us that coal is 

much too valuable to be burned as it used to be. 

S5 



The TOWER 

Science has taught us to win from it carbonic 
and picric acids, paraffin and naphthaline, ben- 
zine, toluene and pitch, ammonium sulphate 
and phosphate for fertilisers, even soot for 
printing inks and polishes, as well as for 
manures. A whole host of lesser trades de- 
pend for their raw material on coal. The 
coal seams of the country have been surveyed 
and classified for this end, and the practical 
problems of carbonising and gasifying the 
raw materials for obtaining those by-products 
and leaving the result available for heat and 
light and power have been tackled by the 
chemists and engineers." 

I am no chemist, but my mind, steadying 
itself, saw into the realities of this tale of 
mineralogical and chemical magic. 

" You should see the works themselves to 
understand it," he ran on. " This and our 
other towns do, in fact, as municipalities, car- 
bonise the bulk of the coal to supply them- 
selves with electric light and energy as uni- 
versally and cheaply as water." 

" I must take it from you," I said. " And 
what is the economic arrangement of 
mining ? " 

" Well," said he, as he lifted another slice 
of fresh warm toast from the electric grill in 
the restaurant where we were sitting, " the 
problem here was how to produce coal for 
these uses both for the miners themselves and 



The TOWER 
the community of which they were a big part, 
and incidentally how to remove the causes of 
quarrels between management and labour 
and efface the rivalries between the sections of 
those engaged in a vital industry. Of course, 
it was primarily a moral matter." 

" You mean the treatment of the employed 
by the employer?" I asked, and as I asked it 
I saw how small my view was. 

" That," said he, " but much more than 
that. The problem travelled deep round 
the roots of property and profiteering, and in- 
volved the questions of avoiding exploitation 
of the State by the miners and of the miners 
by the State, as well as the equitable handling 
of the claims of the present generation of 
private ownership. 

" The solution is not complete yet — is it 
likely? But you will remember that even 
before the War-catastrophe was closed 
down, Labour quietly achieved a momentous 
internal revolution. At first, the Labour 
leaders made the slip of putting prime stress 
on mere political reform. But then they 
achieved the much more potent process of 
associating the forces of Defensive Unionism 
and Productive Co-operation. In this min- 
ing industry, for instance, they linked up the 
distinctive unions of the particular craftsmen 
into one Guild for the industry as a whole. 
They did it by means of sectional representa- 

57 



The TOWER 
tion and a system of transferable cards for use 
between the different occupations of work 
in the pits and at the face, so that deputies 
and surfacemen, enginemen and mechanics, 
coal-hewers and cokemen were no longer kept 
apart by silly rivalries or petty jealousies, 
engineered by the cupidity of the more selfish 
employers or the anxiety of inferior officials. 
Thus they achieved, internally, the power of 
organizing the whole industry, a national in- 
dustry if ever there was one, so as to pro- 
duce a maximum output of coal for the use 
of the general community of consumers, at 
prices fixed by that community. And they 
achieved it by establishing the new kind of 
partnership which was, for these large indus- 
tries, the method of these Guilds." 

" The new partnership, I suppose, means 
with the State ? " 

" Yes," said my friend, smiling, " I see 
your mind accepts the logical result." 

" Well," said I, " it does seem logical, but 
in human affairs I know so well that logic is 
too often akin to pedantry and the dogmas of 
the doctrinaire. In my time the Fabians 
were full of such logic and were constantly 
found tripping into theoretical ponds and 
ditches of their own devising." 

" I grant that," said this humorous State- 
officer. " But," he reflected, " if you think 
upon it, that would be due to the sudden 

58 



The TOWER 

impact of intellectual support against an un- 
stable fabric of manual labour and wage- 
slavery. Anyhow, mind and matter were in 
labour together, and in this mining which we 
talk of, because here, this afternoon, this town 
before our eyes is made of it, the partnership 
with the State was consummated. The State, 
and not the miners, pays the interest on the 
purchase-money with which the soil and plant 
owners were bought out. The State thus 
owns the means of production, but the mines 
are controlled and worked by the central 
federating Guild of the Mining Industry. 
That central Guild, as a national body, has 
distinct functions. It adjusts the re- 
lations of itself with the State and of 
itself with other Guilds. It lays down the 
general standards and rules of the industry. 
It regulates production by its over-control 
both as to qualities and amounts. It co- 
ordinates supply and demand, so as to avoid 
c profits ' and the exploitation of the rest of 
the community by excessive charges. With 
the State as such on the one hand and with 
the whole body of Industrial Guilds on the 
other, it agrees adjustable prices for the proper 
payment of those working the industry and 
the payment of a tax or rent to the State for 
the use of the mines, which tax or rent has rela- 
tion to the State outlay and government. These 
are the functions of the two partners in the 
59 



The TOWER 
association, the Guild so concerned as you see 
with policy and finance as to be the real seat 
of economic power. Locally, in each colliery 
district, there is, as is essential, considerable 
local freedom for organizing the actual work 
of production and arranging the myriad details 
of pit-organization. . . . There, my friend, is 
a narrative for you of a type-achievement of 
our Revolution since the War." 

My mind staggered a little at the blow, 
and indeed I saw my companion's hand pass 
across his own forehead, as if his own recoiled 
a little from the effort of presenting afresh so 
concentrated an image of a vast industrial 
complex. 

" Indeed," I said, " I appreciate your 
trouble. And you mean that that is what 
gives out this livelier folk of men and women 
who look as if they lived and toiled (and 
could even die) in fair contentment and good 
spirits ? " 

" That is so," said he. 

" And I see not," I said, " why the system 
should not be applied to a dozen big indus- 
tries — railways, canals, forestry, and ship- 
building." 

" And so of course it is," said he. " And 
now we must resume our journey. And, 
with your leave, I think we will just keep our 
eyes open for the evening run through a 
beautiful countryside, and not be talking! " 
- 60 



§VI. VILLAGE COMMUNITIES 

t^> t^> t^> t^> t^> t^» t^» ttf>> t^» l^> t^> t^> K^> t^» t<^> t^» t^"> t^» 

AS we sped on our way through a 
district of Derbyshire where de- 
licious villages are nestled among 
high towering peaks and lovely 
scenery the beauty of our land, as 
of old, held me its willing captive. Where, to 
an Englishman, is its equal in the wide world ? 
The good building-stone and the skilled use of 
it and of timber- work, now that craftsmen, who 
were artists had come to work again, seemed 
to have saved a tradition. The use and wont 
of generations was in each village street. But 
I am unlikely to forget the deep thrill of 
pleasure which stirred my heart at the sight, 
too rapid in this particular journey, of a new 
Village Settlement which, as I learned later, 
was but a pattern of many that came out of the 
Catastrophe, so that I may here tell you of it. 

It appears that, with the good sense and 
generosity which mark our Briton at his best, 
England and Scotland were not too dazecl by 
the War to show gratitude to their disabled 
heroes who, emulating those wonderful 
Frenchmen and inspiring the stout-hearted 
champions from America, saved the world, by 
tragedy, from a hideous scourge of misgovern- 
ment. 

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The TOWER 

For the thousands of noble dead and pitiful 
permanently crippled, hundreds of thousands 
were disabled by the damage of modern war- 
fare's machinery and chemistry. The physique 
of fine men and growing lads, the flower of 
the race, was hurt and maimed and sapped and 
broken in a hundred ways; no need to harp on 
the long tale of calamitous suffering. . . . 
Eager to recover, wistful to resume life's 
decent occupations, often prone (let the truth 
be told) to slacken in endeavour under the 
perilous competence of a merited pension, 
these men who had endured terror by land and 
sea and air had turned their backs on Warfare 
and their breasts to the Future. And I learned 
that their countrymen and countrywomen, 
even while the Catastrophe still rocked 
Europe, gave generous and wise compassion 
to these broken, curable champions. Medical, 
economic, and architectural skill gave them 
these village settlements for healing each 
man's damage with patient treatment and apt 
training. In a congenial rural life was found 
the best cure for their physical and mental ills. 
Victims of Bellona's cruel surgery or her be- 
wildering shell-shock, they found encourage- 
ment and life — life soothing and satisfying, in 
the escape out of the hard discipline required 
for the Game of Princes into a comradeship 
and friendly competition in their bodily and 
mental recovery. Their entry into the ranks 
62 



The TOWER 

of agricultural and country life carried with it 
something of the zest for a common purpose 
of both hands and head which, in Flanders and 
Mesopotamia, in Egypt and in France, or on 
the oceans of the waters or the air, had held 
officers and men together in War's own 
peculiar association. Their aggregation in the 
Villages was merciful, to speed their recovery. 
Wisdom mingled many kinds of disablement 
in each group. Older heads on sound-limbed 
bodies ministered to their common prosperity. 
The loving care of mothers, wives, and sisters 
completed what the sweet, strong air of Nature 
and medical skill left possible for their healing. 
So that, as a visitor into a later day, I hap- 
pened upon this cheerful village of busy occu- 
pations which resembled so many of those 
that I have presently to tell you of, only that 
among the lithe-limbed folk — the sturdy 
husbandmen and happy-featured women and 
eager, budding children — I observed a few 
veterans not pitiful and broken as after Water- 
loo, but bravely careless of their injuries. The 
countryside, even where the old villages and 
hamlets had not become these curative centres, 
but had simply been revitalised for the cultiva- 
tion of Mother Earth and her fruit and crops, 
was full of these happily mended warriors 
become a new yeomen-peasantry of England, 
craftsmen, farmers, and market-gardeners. 

*3 



The TOWER 

I should tell you that even close to the cities, 
demanding always some southern, sunlit 
vision of an open scene and clean breath of 
unexhausted air, these Settlements or Colonies 
had been beneficently founded. I later dis- 
covered one on the western skirts of London, 
where the holder of an honoured name of 
nobility had adorned it by a princely gift of 
land that ran from a mansion in a finely 
timbered estate through orchards and gardens 
to the broad, health-yielding tide of the 
Thames. Here, healed by the aid of breezes 
blown from Richmond Park and Surrey and 
the perpetual beauty of the river which carried 
the products of their workshops from little 
docks and waterways cunningly contrived 
against their homes, some two hundred of 
these hurt men had been left settled with their 
families, busy in small crafts suited to their 
disability, and yet near, as men and women 
would wish to be, to the stir and business of 
the Town. And miles away, south-easterly, 
across the great area of the Mother-City, I 
found that the State itself, which in the War- 
time had northwards created good housing for 
the munition workers in an industry that only 
the State should operate, had devoted Crown 
lands to a like good use. Two prosperous 
market - gardening and fruit farms, sur- 
mounted by a bright village busy with little 
trades suitable for Kentish customers, were 

6 4 



The TOWER 
set for ever to mark a green limit to London's 
growth. Just above and in it, crowning a low 
hill with walls that for five centuries — since 
Caxton brought printing to these islands — 
have carried a glorious roof of English wood- 
work, the great hall of a Royal Palace, with 
its gathered memories of tradition and inci- 
dent, was become a kindling home of all that 
music and the fine arts and friendly inter- 
course could give to veterans whose abiding 
frailty kept them sheltered in a neighbouring 
Hospital. 

I will only break my narrative further in 
this side-story to tell you two things briefly. 

It was still keenly remembered when I 
visited the scene that the twelve or thirteen 
hundred maimed or nervous men who were 
originally treated in this medical colony, be- 
fore it settled into a permanent village of 
homes for the two hundred families, found 
their recovery reinforced by some magic sense 
that their future was fortified by a living past. 
For on this very spot Edward III.'s prisoner 
of war, King John of France, was entertained 
as a guest and captivated his victor's daughter 
for his bride; twenty years later Leo, King 
of Armenia, " whose country and realms 
were in danger to be conquered of the 
Turks," came hither at Christmas to 
search the aid of Christendom from 
Richard II.; here Froissart tells us that 

65 



The TOWER 
he offered to that same Richard a book 
" handsomely written and illuminated, and 
bound in crimson velvet, with ten silver-gilt 
studs and two large clasps of silver-gilt, richly- 
worked with roses in the centre," and how the 
King, learning that it treated " Of Love," and 
dipping into it in several places, bade Sir 
Richard Credon carry it to Tiis oratory; the 
very Great Hall that stands here, a noble and 
sound relic, was built by Edward IV. as part 
of his Palace, while later Henry VIII. re- 
moved his Court, to escape from the Plague 
in London or give famous Christmas parties. 
... I was told that a schoolmaster who 
went stout-heartedly to the warfare till his 
nerves were shattered in the Battle of the 
Somme, found himself here for therapeutic 
treatment, and was prompted by a wise doctor 
to explore the history of the place. The lore 
of it became his medicine, and in all kinds of 
curious little doses he imparted it to others. 
He presently became the Steward of the 
Hospital and Controller of the Great Hall, and 
the whole community became his pupils in a 
willing culture of their souls. 

The further matter was that this Village 
was a pattern of an old mode of industrialism 
in somewise restored to England. You re- 
member that Thorold Rogers traced how the 
clearing of land-estates and the Enclosure 
Acts caused a compulsory exodus from the 
66 



The TOWER 

villages, which divorced the healthy associa- 
tion of small manual industries with the art 
of agriculture. These new Village Settle- 
ments appear to have restored that association 
on new lines. It would have been romantic 
but impracticable to bring back the happy, 
self-contained village of Chaucer's or Shake- 
speare's time. But the special stimulus for 
rejecting the big factory system and a clever 
capture of the motor and heating aids of elec- 
tricity combined to reach the old result in 
another way. These dwellers in their own 
homes, each with a considerable garden allot- 
ment, were for the most part partially em- 
ployed in tilling and tending the fruit and 
vegetable farms aforesaid and packing the pro - 
ducts according to the seasons. Their well- 
being was founded on their combination of 
this open-air life with enjoyment in certain 
small or petty trades. A few of the better 
craftsmen, training lads as apprentices, pro- 
duced good furniture in their small wood- 
workshops, some of the worse-crippled occu- 
pied in turnery as less fatiguing than bench- 
work. I noticed that the machinery of a 
band-saw was welcomed for getting out the 
harder wood in the rough, so as to release the 
craftsman for giving the beauty of his hand- 
work in the completed piece. And in rather 
larger shops, with that kind of fantastic 
activity which Dumazet noticed in a more 

«7 



The TOWER 

happily industrial France all round Beauvais 
and Amiens, as well as in theirown homes, 
the greater number of the men in the winter 
were producing a host of the engaging articles 
of wood, or wood and iron, which the general 
community needed in thousands — pieces for 
weavers, spindles, measures, funnels, brooms, 
mouse-traps, spoons, salt-boxes, plate-racks, 
and so forth. An added industry for a 
separated group was for the fabrication of felt 
hats such as I remembered near Quimperle, 
in Brittany, and for our own straw hats at 
Luton. Most of the women and girls whom 
domestic management did not absorb were 
occupied in their own homes or upon gowns 
and embroidery. There were no employers. 
In each of the trades the workers belonged to 
a co-operative society and sent their produce 
every fortnight to a co-operative store in the 
town, where it was sold for their benefit by 
their own direct agent-members. I ascer- 
tained that in order to buy material in bulk 
at good seasons they were financed by muni- 
cipal credit-banks, which made advances on 
the security of their good character and their 
plant. 

The homes of these happy and contented 
workers, which as a rule were not owned by 
them, usually belonged to a Public Utility 
Society easily directed by a Board of disin- 
terested men and women such as, to their 
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praise, have ever been concerned for local 
government in our Islands. 

I can hardly communicate to you my de- 
lighted impression of the cheerful and pros- 
perous life in these little communities; and 
when I recall that they were originally born 
out of the agony of the War and the pitiful 
experience of its victims, I can only do 
homage to the Divine which redeems all 
Human Life and glorifies its trials. 

And I hold in honouring remembrance that 
courageous man who lived at both ends of 
the Thames and sang of the Day that was 
Coming : — 

For then, laugh not, but listen to this strange tale of 

mine. 
All folk that are in England shall be better lodged than 
swine. 

Then a man shall work and bethink him, and rejoice in 

the deeds of his hand, 
Nor yet come home in the even too faint and weary to 

stand. 

Men in that time a-coming shall work and have no fear 
For to-morrow's lack of earning and the hunger-wolf 
a-near. 

I tell you this for a wonder, that no man then shall be 

glad 
Of his fellow's fall and mishap to snatch at the work 

he had. 
For that which the worker winneth shall then be his 

indeed, 
Nor shall half be reaped for nothing by him that sowed 

no seed. 

6 9 



The TOWER 

O strange new wonderful justice ! But for whom shall 

we gather the gain ? 
For ourselves and for each of our fellows, and no hand 

shall labour in vain. 

Then all Mine and all Thine shall be Ours, and no 

more shall any man crave 
For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend 

for a slave. 

Come, join in the only battle wherein no man can fail, 
Where whoso fadeth and dieth, yet his deeds shall still 
prevail. 

Ah ! come, cast off all fooling, for this, at least, we 

know : 
That the Dawn and the Day is coming, and forth the 

Banners go. 



70 



t^» t^> C^> t^> t^J t^» t^ t^» t^i «^"> t^J t^5 t^> t^> t^> t^> l^»t^i 

§VII. NEW TOWNS 

t^> l^> t^"S t^l t^> t^» C^5 t^> fc^J t^> t^> t^> «^> Ci?" - t^> «^» t^> t^» 

AS I look back upon my experience 
of that amazing and joy-giving 
journey through a new England, 
I can recall even apparently small 
things which contributed to my 
sense of her being what the Priest had 
spoken of— a Tower of courage and comfort, 
within and outwardly, where most of the 
headcraft or handcraft contributions of each 
worker to the commonwealth were exchanged 
among the members of the community. 

Both in the large Sale-stores and in the cheer- 
ful small workshops, which I almost preferred 
to haunt for the pleasure of hobnobbing 
with the iron-smith over his forge or a wood- 
worker himself assembling a bedstead out of 
all the parts he had made, I detected a quiet 
beauty of the products of this fresher genera- 
tion. Scribe as I was in my calling, I just 
knew that it signified a reasonable pleasure 
in the making of the things. 

I found that a not wholly anticipated but 
entirely natural result of the emancipation of 
industry from wage-slavery and its mis- 
capitalisation by non-producers was the crea- 
tion of free craftsmen. That is to say, in the 
trades which lent themselves to scope for the 

7i 



The TOWER 

exercise of the creative birthright which dis- 
tinguishes the free worker from the slave, such 
as smithy-work and nearly all wood-work, 
turnery and inlaid work, leather work from 
harness of all kinds to the production of good, 
durable boots, pottery, tailoring, printing and 
building in all its branches, from fine masonry 
to the finish of the smallest mouldings, there 
was a zest which appeared to have a direct 
relation to the quality and durable fitness of 
the products. For many of the commodities 
which our crowded population needs (like 
electric lamps and food tins and lead pencils 
and screws and common bottles), factories — 
that is, large workshops for the association of 
comparatively unskilled labour with time- 
saving machinery — still, of course, remained. 
But even here the processes were not so 
mechanical and deadening to the spirit as of 
old. This, I found, was partly because the 
Labour Community was thoroughly infected 
with an irresistible intention of having reason- 
able leisure among reasonable employment. It 
had demanded and had obtained it. It was no 
longer stunted in its intelligence and capacity 
for pleasure by any degrading meanness of its 
homes or poisonous dirt in its environment. 

And I discovered also that the folk of Eng- 
land as a whole, those who lived either in 
towns or through the countryside, by the 
labour of their hands mainly or as brain- 
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The TOWER 
workers, professional men and women and all 
engaged in commerce (there being now very 
few unfortunate persons of sound health who 
were mere rent-drawers or unoccupied with 
some task or other), that all these folk, I say, 
were, like their Tudor and Georgian fore- 
fathers, content with a much simpler and 
smaller amount of furniture and dress for their 
daily life, and that Society no longer itched for 
the myriad follies and rubbish which Labour 
was hired to produce in the Victorian time. 

It was, for instance, less easy to find a home 
in Kensington, where a living room would be 
crowded with a crazy collection of bric-a-brac 
and cheap German ornaments, and fussy 
frames for insignificant prints, and bits of un- 
stable furniture which no producer ever felt 
any pride in making and every housemaid fret- 
fully cursed each morning in dusting. As I 
found later, the homesteads and cottages of 
the rural districts were once again devoid of 
the nasty cheap products of sweated labour, 
and cheerful rather with articles of use and 
want, well-made because usually made at 
home or in the district. 

I cannot pretend to tell you how causes and 
effects were related, or how the looms of in- 
dustrial activity, with all their shuttles and 
cunning contrivances, produced this happy 
result. But I do believe that it was accele- 
rated by, and indeed could not have been 
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The TOWER 
achieved without, that passionate and almost 
religious revolution in " the hearts of men " 
(as Jan Smuts used to iterate in the War-time 
itself) to which the tragedy of the Catastrophe 
stirred the folk of our Islands, compelling 
them to make a better social fabric for the 
common weal. . . . 

This New Life, of which I speak thus 
briefly, was nowhere more apparent or vivid 
than in the New Towns which I discovered in 
my pilgrimage. 

I would tell you of one, not stopping to tell 
you of quite remarkable changes which were 
arranged in the cities of the north, from York- 
shire through to Scotland and across in the 
rival districts of East and West Lancashire 
and in " the Potteries." The workers had re- 
fused any longer to tolerate for homes the 
pitiable housing of cramped and graceless 
streets and shoddy building which their fathers 
had put up with. Curiously enough, the chief 
weapons of destruction were the forks and 
spades which were so busy on allotments in 
the War time. Keightley vigorously pioneered 
the protest. At Leicester the gardening of 
the townsfolk transformed the city. Salford 
and Portsmouth one wonderful spring night 
were each, by one of those inexplicable sympa- 
thetic outbursts of action which, like the 
breaking of an unhealthy abscess, are found 
among the episodes of history, the scene of a 
74 



The TOWER 

wild destruction of slum property, certain 
Trade-Guilds having quietly and successfully 
planned the exodus of some wretched 
families at midnight before a breeze fanned a 
mysterious conflagration into a consuming 
furnace. The flames were a fiery banner for 
a crusade against all hovels and dirty tene- 
ments, and the aims of town-planners were 
rapidly advanced. . . . 

I have said I would tell you of a New 
Town, and I will choose one in Warwick- 
shire, built at Thurlaston, between Coventry 
and Rugby, where Guy once slew the Blue 
Boar. 

From Canada our Home Government bor- 
rowed the idea of a Ministry of Conservation 
and Development which controlled its own 
housing. In the War-time itself, as an able 
Scotsman told me who had pioneered it, the 
Canadian authorities printed 50,000 leaflets 
on sensible housing, 10,000 of them (by a 
happy stroke) in the French language. They 
realised the wisdom of that big-brained and 
big-hearted American, Edison, who once said : 
" Only as we each forget our selfish desires 
and keep in mind the final good of all con- 
cerned, shall we reduce the cost of living 
and solve our great social and industrial 
problems." . . . 

This New Town in Warwickshire was one 
of nine, the building of which was definitely 
IS 



The TOWER 
encouraged, and indeed in part undertaken, 
by the State immediately after the War. 

The plans were prepared during the War, 
much as during the French Revolution the de- 
signs of a remodelled Paris were drawn out 
by industrious architects in her city cellars 
while the fury raged above. 

The Government, to their own astonish- 
ment and the alarm of unimaginative people, 
were impelled to it by the demands of Labour- 
workers by brain and hand, who insisted very 
articulately that the enlargement of existing 
cities, with their mean and designless belts 
of haphazard slums and factories, would be 
a national crime and an affront to the men 
who had fought and died for England. The 
whole weight of economic, civic and hygienic 
wisdom was brought to bear, irresistibly, on 
this solution of the necessity for overdue 
housing schemes and for a just and sound 
method of industrial productivity. The result 
was truly astonishing. It would have de- 
lighted that ardent and happy reformer of the 
days of my youth, Howard, who, luckier than 
most prophets in their own age and country, 
conceived that idea of the Garden-City which, 
through good report and ill, leavened town- 
building in every nation of the Old World 
and the New, from Portugal to La Plata. 

The advantages of what was implicit in a 
crude doctrine of land-nationalisation were 

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The TOWER 

obtained, without its weakness, by a State 
aided system of municipal land-purchase. 
This bridged the interval before the new- 
built town was ready to hold its first dwellers. 
It secured a reasonable control of plan, size 
and arrangement. It prevented the incre- 
ment of the city's later communal wealth from 
passing into private pockets and gave it back, 
in the adornment of its Public Buildings and 
Gardens and in a Gallery and a Theatre of 
living art and drama, to those who had 
earned it. 

With forethought the railway serving the 
Town was concealed from all its residential 
quarters, the clatter and banging of its traffic 
cut off by rising ground which also screened 
the noisier factories to and from which the 
railroad brought material and carried pro- 
ducts. The Town itself had already become 
comely and settled in appearance, not too 
uniform to be inviting, but not so chaotic as 
to disgust. I was told that this particular 
town was mainly designed and erected by a 
school of architectural carftsmen trained by 
Lutyens, whom I remembered that the praise 
of his own fellow-masters, the best praise, de- 
clared to be among the first artists of his day. 
The Town-centre was extraordinarily well- 
managed, so that you could not detect the 
artifices of its design. It revived in my heart 
the thrill with which, one morning of May, I 

>7 



The TOWER 

stood under the Rath-haus of Rothenburg in 
Bavaria (a city vieing with our own Bridg- 
north in the natural beauty of its site, and 
unspoiled like Bridgnorth), and with my com- 
rade fondly believed that a clear song from 
silver trumpets high on its tower was a special 
compliment of welcome to ourselves. The 
ensemble of the place was such that my mind 
foresaw that future generations would find 
the planning and the architecture pleasing be- 
cause well-done, like Salisbury and Wood- 
bridge of the towns and cities of the older 
time, which were least damaged by shoddy 
building and defaced with the itch and disease 
of the competitive scramble after money. 

The divisible or sectional factories, with 
light partitions, convenient loading apparatus, 
fixtures for power transmission and central 
heating, were sensible achievements of 
modern skill and forethought, encouraging 
good work and stimulating co-operative skill. 

I noticed in particular that all the School - 
sites had been carefully chosen and protected. 
Sunshine, quiet, airiness and space were 
secured in fullest degree — and the children 
showed it! 

Indeed, it was, as you may suppose, the 
obvious enrichment of human life through the 
establishment of this New Town and its trad- 
ing regulations that both first and finally 
pleased me. I am aware that my countrymen 

78 



The TOWER 
have been censured as unmusical. It may be 
that a capacity for the pure pleasure of good 
popular music was strangled by the joy- 
slaying devices of the nineteenth century. 
But I confess that my soul bounded with de- 
light at the noon-day Folk-concert to which 
the people of this Town flocked as a recreation 
from their labours. 

I do not suppose that the trials and troubles 
which dwell in some of the shuttles of Fate 
that are thrown for ever in the loom of Human 
Life are absent from these new communities. 
Jealousy and anger and meanness and passion 
remain as the tokens of our imperfection, the 
prices of our birthright. I am speaking of a 
merry England, not a dull Heaven. But I do 
say that I believed I was but dreaming when 
I beheld this cheerful multitude of citizens— 
the children with their lively, reckless ways; 
the older folk held in honour, and not dulled or 
bent by toil; the young men and maidens — 
all tall, straight, round-faced, and well-com- 
plexioned — at this hour of amusement simply 
the children grown large until their general 
healthy and open companionship tumbled into 
particular love-making which was neither shy 
nor low; the wives proud, and not weary, from 
their motherhood, so that you might say of 
each what Hardy put as the desire of his hero 
— " a child among pleasures and a woman 
among pains " ; the men, having doffed the 
79 



The TOWER 

overalls and tunics of their workshops so as 
to bathe their heads and limbs in the pure 
summer air for an hour, consciously and de- 
cently aware, as becomes men, that a Ruskin 
need no longer warn that they are not to be 
helped by almsgiving or by preaching of 
patience or of hope, or by any other means 
emollient or consolatory, except the one thing 
God orders for them — justice. 

So that, now, you will ask, what are the con- 
ditions of Labour in this New Life in such a 
New Town ? What is their share of the con- 
trol in the organised trades? And have the 
workers absorbed, or repudiated, or repaid the 
capital moneys of the non-workers ? 

Well, I have mentioned Salisbury, and I 
cannot say that the new industrial fabric, in 
these new days, matches what once suited 
Salisbury, so that its attractive traces are still 
visible in Poultry Cross and Butcher Row, in 
the Hall of John Halle on the Canal, with its 
old attractive stained glass; the Jacobean 
facade of the Joiners' Hall, in St. Ann 
Street, the windows and oak shields 
from the Tailors' Hall, built when Henry 
VIII. was king, at the corner of Pennyfarth- 
ing Street in Swayne's or the Ship Chequer, 
near the Crystal Fountain Inn (delicious 
names !) ; and the earlier Doom fresco over the 
chancel arch of the Church of St. Thomas, 
which some fortunate merchant pilgrim had 
80 



The TOWER 
painted to the honour of St. Oswald. Such 
are the survivals of the time when the authori- 
ties which regulated trade in the interests of 
the whole community, subject to the Crown 
executive and Municipal control, were the 
Merchants' Guild, including all those that 
traded in commodities which they did not 
make, such as the export and import merchant, 
the grocer, the mercer, the vintner, and the 
woolmonger, and the Crafts' Guilds of those 
engaged in the home industries, such as 
weavers, skinners, joiners, bakers, glovers, 
shoemakers, and clothworkers — a good indus- 
trial company, full of local and workshop 
patriotism, given to healthy amusements, 
their handiwork supplying their livelihood, 
their labour yielding a life of liberty and 
character. 

What further help, have I often thought 
in my youth, will vou, O Worship- 
ful Companies of the Mysteries or 
Trades of Carpenters, Goldsmiths, Mer- 
cers, Skinners, Clothworkers and Leather- 
sellers of the City of London, already 
generous in modern generations, render out 
of your munificence and funded inheritances 
to buy back for Modern Labour its thwarted 
leisure and shackled freedom? And lo! 
here, in these new Towns of England, I found 
the fruits of their applied wealth, in the re- 
organisation of all skilled work and the dis- 
81 



The TOWER 

tribution of its results, and the provision of 
comely Guilds' Halls where differences and 
problems could be adjusted and the comfort- 
able arts of hospitality jovially indulged. 

For it appeared that on the tide of pas- 
sionate endeavour which arose to sweep out 
the waste and woe of the War, the folk of 
England launched a new system. For the 
trades other than those vast staple vocations 
which, as I have told you, readily took on the 
form of National Guilds associated with 
the State control of material, retained in 
appearance the various outward shapes and 
modes of industrial method — ranging from 
the personal craftsman through partnerships 
and group-workshops to highly organised and 
graded societies or corporations. Manage- 
ment and working capital were still indis- 
pensable to all but a few trades, and good 
sense as well as a frank and extremely active, 
not to say pugnacious, dislike of all roguery 
and drone-like absenteeism had achieved 
wonders. Indeed, I can report that the whole 
Spirit of Labour was differently tempered. 
Dispelling the sad old atmosphere of com- 
peting and grab, and suspicion and nasty prac- 
tices of black-listing and sabotage, a steady 
breeze of industrial reform, inspired mainly 
by humane standards of workshop life, and a 
general recognition that a life that is not 
laborious is, except for the tender, the crippled 
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The TOWER 

and the aged, not worth living, had fanned 
the mills of national activity. 

Of the life on the land, so that once more 
in our English shires Mother Earth teemed 
with her crops and fruits under the tillage of 
a sturdy rural husbandry, I shall presently 
tell you. 

Here I have to record what I could dis- 
cover of the causes and conditions which had 
occasioned the better state of labour which 
I found in the workshops and factories of 
this type of New Town, beyond what was 
contributed by the environment of sensible 
planning and healthy home-building. 

I found that in each of the organised trades 
(which covered the largest field of industry 
between the business or the individual crafts- 
men, whose numbers, as I have mentioned, 
had greatly increased, and the national 
guilds of miners, ship-builders and transport- 
workers) a healthy and kindling trade-con- 
sciousness had been created. Each such in- 
dustry, being given its own frontiers and its 
flag, had come to have its own patriotism from 
which, as you might expect, higher standards 
of both work and conduct were the happy 
consequences. Do you know what I mean, 
O reader ? Yes, if you are yourself a worker, 
you will know it from your own experience. 
Your own heart in your work will tell you. . . 

The quality of your work is heightened 

83 



The TOWER 

when you are not annoyed or disheartened by 
tricks to capture the fruits of it away from 
you, or by a system which fences you off from 
the intercourse or appreciation of those who 
use your products. 

The quality of your conduct is enriched 
when for your physical well-being the decen- 
cies and amenities of the place of your labour 
are consulted, so that you exchange the very 
spirit of them with that of your own hearth 
and home, where are the centres of all the love 
and grace that is in your life. 

And lest you should think that I narrate 
something that is only an ideal Message from 
Nowhere, let me assure you that men and 
women have only come to these standards of 
a more cheerful and worthy life by much 
patience over humdrum remedies and by dint 
of that forbearance and denial which are the 
marks of religion, the very stigmata of the 
cross which Labour carries along the Road of 
Life. Thus, this new generation benefited 
by sensible and permanent habits for the 
periodic review of the rates of wages and pay 
— recognising that the discs of gold and silver 
are but mere counters of exchange and not 
wealth in themselves; for the standardising of 
flatter rates throughout the country, so as to 
supplant the illogical variations of different 
localities; for frequent and regular intercourse 
between shop-stewards and managers, so that 

8 4 



The TOWER 

the directorate should not be for ever tempted 
to " outpoint " the workers; for a closer asso- 
ciation of all engaged in the industry so as to 
increase the publicity of its conditions, and, in 
ways both economic and psychological, give to 
the toilers a share and interest in their pro- 
ductions. 

These, in this New England, are the charac - 
ters of a New Labour won by national effort. 
The old remedies of co-partnership, scientific 
management, payment by results, would 
never have achieved it. A national effort, 
patient and courageous, by the forces of all 
Labour directed by leaders of trained intelli- 
gence, has created in these New Towns a life 
of which I could only discern the difficult 
beginnings in the great Wen and the other 
cities of my youth, when we sought to save 
the land from the hands of dead-weight 
people; and the Catastrophe produced the 
Opportunity. 

Thus, a Century and a Tragedy have been 
wanted since that forth-right man, William 
Cobbett, proclaimed from horseback his 
opinion of what was needed for the workers 
of England whom he saw in rags and without 
a bellyful : — 

That the way to make them good, to make them 
honest, to make them dutiful, to make them kind to 
one another, is to enable them to live well; and I also 
know that none of these things will ever be accom- 

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The TOWER 

plished by Methodist sermons, and by those stupid, at 
once stupid and malignant things, and roguish things 
called Religious Tracts. 

Thus Cobbett, stretching his hand across 
two generations to Morris, who watched the 
faces and figures of them that went by his 
riverside windows at Hammersmith, and 
replied : — 

I know by my own feelings and desires what these 
men want, what would have saved them from this lowest 
depth of savagery : employment which would foster 
their self-respect and win the praise and sympathy oi 
their fellows, and dwellings which they could come to 
with pleasure, surroundings which would soothe and 
elevate them; reasonable labour, reasonable rest. 



86 



t^» «^> e^ t^i t^> t^> t^> t^J t^> t^» t^s <*?"-. t^> t^> t^5 t^a t^ «^> 

§VIII. THE COUNTRYSIDE 

t^J t^J t^ t^ tj&i i&t t^5 t^J t^> «^> t^5 1^> t^> t^a t^ t^> t^> e^> 

THERE was, as I found, one abid- 
ing and uplifting glory left in 
England — the calm dignity in 
all seasons of the countryside, 
with its stir of labour against the 
challenge of Nature, its direct relation of 
Man's demands to God's supplies, its settled 
rotation of the beautiful and the awesome to 
stimulate the wonder of all sensitive creatures. 
So threatened by the folly of my fore- 
fathers, if this dignity had been stolen from 
my country, I do indeed think that life would 
be a long nightmare for my children's children, 
But, then, Mother-Nature cannot and will 
not die until in some solar holocaust .... 
But I will keep to my tale, reminding you, 
as I do myself, of those comfortable words of 
John Ruskin : — 

Hard labour on the earth, the work of the husband- 
man and of the shepherd ... to dress the earth and to 
keep the flocks of it . . . the first task of man and the final 
one . . . the education always of noblest lawgivers, kings, 
and teachers; the education of Hesiod, of Moses, of 
David, of all the true strength of Rome; and all its 
tenderness; the pride of Cincinnatus, and the inspira- 
tion of Virgil. 

They ran, like a pleasant echo, along the 

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The TOWER 
little corridors of my mind, as my roan mare 
bore me through the gates and up the broken 
road to the top of the hill whence I knew that 
I should see the sea whose salt scent already 
just reached me through the mist. 

I had left the square-planned old English 
town set between the rivers by its western 
road, and struck south for the heath across the 
bridge under whose warm stone and brick 
arches the trout hung as if no gallant band of 
King Charles' men had ever fallen by its para- 
pets with noisy death-dealing clamour. The 
heather was at the top of its glory, not yet 
tinged with brown of decay, as we swung along 
the road-side turf towards the Castle woods. 
But alas! the scuds of a coming rain-storm 
began to veil the ridge and quickly, over my 
left shoulder, hid the sharp lime-stone hill-top 
which, beyond the two fir-clad mounds, cut 
the rounded edge of the downs. However, as 
I turned her seawards to climb the height, I 
cared not for the damp, and only praised the 
Creator of this scene, whoever he might be, 
and hummed the modern poet's psalm : 

Oh, London Town's a fine town, and London sights 

are rare, 
And London ale is right ale, and brisk's the London air, 
And busily goes the world there; but crafty grows the 

mind, 
And London Town of all towns I'm glad to leave 

behind. 

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The TOWER 

Then hey for the road, the west road, by bridge and 

forge and fold, 
Scent o* the fern and song o* the lark, by hills and 

woods and wold; 
To the homely folk at the hearthstone, and the ale 

beside the fire, 
In the western land, the goodly land, my land o* 

Heart's Desire. 

At the top I buttoned my tunic and cape as 
I guided her to twist the gate-latch with my 
crop, and then I found two other horsemen, 
who had come eastwards along the top to 
where the road wound down the hill. And we 
rode down it together, warily, to a farm. 

" Here's a good shelter, sir, at any rate." 

We came with our horses out of the deluge 
of a summer thunder-storm into the yard of a 
stone-built barn, and turned them, steaming, 
through the door, to wait till the rain was 
over. 

The uniforms of my companions declared 
them to be yeomanry officers, with the air of 
country gentlemen — alert, truth - dealing, 
hearty men such as England has ever bred in 
the countryside. Free for a morning from 
their summer training, they had ridden to- 
gether for an hour or so along these Purbeck- 
heights above the glitter and shades of the 
Channel, where — how long ago it seemed to 
me!— a force of defenders once before the 
Great War resisted an attack of mock in- 
vaders, giving a real discipline and a broad 

89 



The TOWER 

efficiency of mind and limb to well-filled bands 
of townsmen and provincials. 

They hung their dripping cloaks on a row 
of nails. 

" What a heavenly quiet here," said the 
elder. " It was good of you to bring me over. 
Besides, I have the charming hospitality, such 
as we can still find at some houses in old 
England, of your lady and yourself." 

The younger man was pleased, for he had 
evidently taken trouble in an easy way to bring 
his superior officer as his guest. It appeared, 
as they told me in their friendly talk, that he 
was the life tenant of a small, but fair, estate, 
and had been for a time the despair of the 
family lawyers and the more crotchety of his 
trustees for the way in which he, for one, 
baffled the arguments of the communists for 
an example of selfish ownership. 

" Your people at the farms as we came 
through, even the old men and the very 
children at the gates, seem unusual somehow 
and not over-loaded like some I know. They 
look really cheerful — smiling honestly, the 
men and women looking fresher and more 
open than I see them elsewhere. 

" Well, sir, my father took care about it in 
the upheaval after the Catastrophe, and I try to 
follow him. And let us say the countryside is 
now at last in for a hopeful time, although 
there's still such a terrible croaking and hum- 
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The TOWER 

bugging in the Press. I sometimes think it's 
a good thing these country folk don't have 
time for all the newspapers that your feverish 
city-folk will still pore over. As it is, they do 
unhappily get hold of the wrong ones — the 
murders and sudden deaths and a pickle of 
silly trash. . . . But, you see, I hold — and 
it ought to be simple enough for every one to 
grasp and proclaim — that the right aim of a 
nation is the creation of fine human beings, 
social and kindly, and not merely the produc- 
tion of national wealth. Things are getting 
better, slowly but surely, in the big towns, 
now that the hearts of men have revolted 
against so much grinding greed and restless 
rush and have reduced the chances of 
foreign trouble by getting armaments 
reduced. That is why we hope for our 
nation — both here at home and over the 
seas. To grow fine human beings we found 
that we must repeople the land. In our grand- 
fathers' time a great wrong was done to the 
agricultural labourer. But with the War 
over, we got him back to the land, keen, 
efficient, uncringing, feeling that he had a 
stake in the country, courageous in outlook, 
initiative in action, co-operative with his 
neighbours. Democracy in general, and the 
rural credit-bank in particular, gave him no 
need of the gombeen man, no dread of the 
squire. His son could no longer become the 
9i 



The TOWER 

poor creature whom a Bishop once saw in the 
old days scaring rooks off a cornfield and itch- 
ing to follow two sisters off to Canada because 
" I think that chaps like us have not got much 
of a chance in these parts." His daughter has 
not fretted for the town and its crafty traps, 
or slipped off in the night, like the girls of 
a former Ireland, to the colonies. Nowadays, 
a country boy has a sensible schooling, with 
an improved book and science training, but is 
offered a carpenter's bench and a mechanic's 
vice for the evenings and some healthy fun in 
village-hall for the long wintry nights, so as 
to earn better money from State-aided farmers 
and get some sense of security in the right to 
work and a proper and reasonable pay for that 
work. The village maiden, kept from all 
drudgery in childhood, has at least every 
chance of staying in her country home, with 
reasonable field or dairy toil, reasonable rest, 
to be ready for an honourable and happy 
mating, and so to become the proud mother 
of fine human beings. ... So, and only so, 
is the life of the country being revivified and 
rekindled. In no other way can we have 
again some modern version of the old 
peasantry who once worked round your great 
barns and built the hamlet churches; the 
happy village-mothers and the sturdy fathers 
whom Pinwell and Fred Walker used to draw 
for us in England and Millet in France." 
92 



The TOWER 

" It seems to me," I said, " that in your 
generation you have found that it was pos- 
sible. And, as I have gathered in my rural 
rides, it has come because after the War there 
were some few thousands of intelligent and 
unprejudiced men, including those happily 
cured from their broken nerves and wasted 
muscles, who, having had some business or 
civil training before they fought for Liberty, 
were willing to learn from agricultural instruc- 
tors and settle on the land." 

"You are right," said the older man. " In 
old days, attempts to settle soldiers on the 
land often failed, because retired long-service 
men did not get on well with the village folk 
whom they joined. But the men you speak 
of were of a different type, and the State wisely 
encouraged them to settle in large enough 
groups to form a society for themselves. 
They were shy about it at first, longing to be 
quit of all army ways and a little suspicious 
of State-aid, but good sense prevailed after 
the first careful experiments." 

" It must," I said, " have cost a big effort 
to win this miracle, with Canada and Australia 
and Asia pouring in their ship-loads of grain ; 
with a vast territory like Russia at last and 
again, after her own tragedies in the War, de- 
veloping her agriculture by the aid of our 
British 'Ransomes' and other implements; 
with the machinery here at home displacing 
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The TOWER 

labour; and with the gay, bright towns piping 
their appeal to a youth or a maid just as man- 
hood and womanhood is rising up like sap 
with the desire of liberty and adventure ? " 

" Yes, 55 replied the other, " there were all 
those forces to meet. But the change came, 
for all their thwarting. c All things flow,' as 
the Greek sage said, and history repeats its 
circles in all essential movements of social life. 
Let us track it out, for this rain is pelting. 
But here comes an expert, perhaps, in prophet's 
garb! He'll shelter here and we 5 ll consult 
him. I have often got wisdom from fellow- 
travelling strangers on a journey. Truth 
often leaps in flashes on a chance talk, to 
lighten up ignorance or obscurity. . . . 
Good-day to you ! " 

" Annan ? B-r-r-h ! — but it's wet, so it is ! 
You gents did well to get here avore this 
scud." 

And the comical figure shook himself and 
slid a worn oilskin cape from his shoulders. 
He was an old pedlar, with baggy trousers 
over sodden white shoes, a dragging frock 
coat, and on the top of his grizzled head a 
once gay cricket cap. He gave the eye a 
strange contrast to the solid, military apparel 
of our fellow-shelterers, as, muttering, he laid 
his staff against a door-jamb and stopped to 
wipe the wet off a strange pack of buttons and 
tapes and picture cards. 

94 



The TOWER 

The young captain continued the talk to 
prevent awkwardness. 

" Still, even if the Ford tractors and all 
the other engines and reapers and binders do 
the work of many hands, the great rich earth 
remains for ever to be tilled, and our Colonials 
have always told us it was the best. We took 
a hint from them and kept the rating on the 
first capital value and multiplied new uses 
for the land, tilling again some of the pastures 
and planting the right trees in the right places. 
It has taken time, but the pastoral poets need 
not starve. After all, as the Irishman says, 
i there will always be love, twilight and the 
stars ' ! Won't there, Daniel ? " 

" Thomas, Captain, Thomas — not Dan'l 
Thomas Stickland — at least so it was fifty 
years ago. I was an army man myself then," 
and his little eyes twinkled as he stood at 
salute, one leg hanging a little loose. " ' Luv, 
twilight, and the shining stars ' ! Yes, I'm 
too old for part of it, though Pm fairly spry 
still to get athirt these girt hills; but many a 
night avore I've hided in the barns after the 
twilight has come on, I've gazed at the stars 
as they've lit, and wondered if the folk in 
'em have their problems an' if there's a huge, 
overcrowded wen of a city in the Great Bear, 
and whether there be ploughin' and tillin' and 
hoein' in the luvely Evening Star, or only 
95 



The TOWER 

veary rings and shining lights. I shouldn't 
wonder! " 

" Are you countryman or town ? " said one 
of the others, puzzled at the notions and 
mixed speech. 

" I've a-been a-walken most of my days 
since the Fritzes hit me. Don't get so stiff, 
perhaps! But I've had to scraggle about, 
and I knows the old Kent Road as well as 
I know the Heath to Wareham. You can't 
say that, Captains! You're swells, and, any- 
way, you've never known what it is for chaps 
o' the like of me. Mebbe, you've had no 
time to think. Gawd in Heaven, what 
thinkin' I've done in my time! An' good 
thinkin', too, mark you. Old soger, yes — 
bashed by nasty bullets for a grateful country; 
thirty years on the scrap-heap, because they 
could do nothing with me. I was a born 
roamer, I was. Ah! but I've alius had my 
thought-pot with me! " and he tapped his 
grizzled head; " and I've often said to Tom, 
I have, * Tom, my son, you knew what the 
Old Country wanted, for all they thought you 
a poor mad Tom. You were born on the 
land, Tom, you were, and you should have 
known what was coming and kept your 
strength there, and waxed thick and lusty and 
sweated among the crops and the beasts, and 
taken a wholesome maid— luv, twilight and 
the stars! — and a little house for your palace, 
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The TOWER 
Tom, with a bit o' garden. You were a dam* 
fool, Tom, to itch for the flaring and lying 
town and be caught for sogering.' . . . But 
there, what was a chap to do, guv'nors ? What 
was a young feller to do, if he believed that 
all the siller he'd get for ever and ever was 
ever so little more than what he made as a 
lad at the farm, and 'e couldn't love his maid 
and do honest by her when 'e wanted to be- 
cause there was no cottage for him if there 
were : it was tied to farmer Jorkins from Kent 
way, whom he'd like to squot with a big 
clout, only Moses and parson said you 
mustn't ! What was a young feller to do ? " 

" Well, Tom," said the younger man, 
" you know they mended things." 

" Mended 'em now perhaps, gents ! But 
not quite in time for poor Tom. I was sent 
crazy, too, by that awful din in Flanders for 
a time, and none to befriend me, and then the 
great Mother healed me, and I thought things 
out for myself so long ago and no one to listen 
to me. And now I find it done, but too late 
for me. . . . That's all there is between 
us. I'll tell you. . . . Tom's done some 
thinking! " 

And from his pack of poor cards he picked 
a grimy envelope with some scribbled notes 
and old paper clippings to address this quaint 
public meeting. The captains had hardly 
noticed that children had slipped in from the 
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The TOWER 
farm, attracted by the voices — a little maid 
and a slip of a boy, into whose fist Tom passed 
a piece of stale chocolate. 

" Gen'lemen, you'd a-got to clear the 
ground first. No, not robbery and confis 
catin', I don't mean that, though Gawd knows 
there's precedent! I mean, in your thinkin\ 
Tou don't remember the Enclosure Laws — 
nor do I — but if you gents can't I can bide 
my gran'feyther talkin' of them and what 
they meant, and how they druv the people 
into the towns. Lord, it was a tragic busi- 
ness for England, that was — and ifs in that 
story , mark you " (and he fumbled for a 
printed note from which he solemnly read), 
c that there lies the moral case for the restora- 
tion of the land to the people! ' Mark that 
and digest it — c the moral case for the restora- 
tion of the land to the people.' Harder 
farmers, more selfish and town-haunting 
squires, sporting gents from the cities — they 
dated from that Enclosure time (mind, I don't 
say everywhere, but most- where' s). And 
then the other big thing that happened was 
the machinery — the building of the clever 
engines and the massing of the factories and 
workshops, so that the fields were deserted 
and the ploughshares were left to rust on the 
edges of grass-land, and the ploughboys, or 
some of them, turned keepers." 

" Foreign corn, too, Tom." 

9 8 



The TOWER 

" Ah yes — I agree ; Pm coming to that. 
But Pm right, gents, ain't I, about the 
Enclosures and the Machinery ? " 

They nodded inevitably. 

" Agricultur', the tilling of the soil God 
gave men and women to live by and on, got 
neglected through the old Queen's reign. 
The people flocked to the towns, and mebbe it 
'ud be all right if they flourished there. But 
did they? It's why the prices o' food rose, 
wasn't it ? It's why the men an' women had 
bad teeth and cheatin' ways, wasn't it? It's 
why the children didn't grow up bonny and 
civil and hopeful, like even these. It's why, 
with the acres o' ugly, dirty little dwellings 
and the meanness of the noisy streets, the 
women took to drink and the men to driving 
them to it. It's why there was for many a 
year more misery hidden in almost any square 
mile of London and Manchester and Glasgow 
(I've tramped them all) than any kind God 
could have meant men to allow. . . . Ah ! I 
know, and I'm mortal glad and thank the Lord 
I see it avore I die, else there'd be no Heaven 
open to share in, that things are mending a 
good bit, and that in the towns the big blunder 
came to be known for what it was, and men 
and women rebelled agin' it. It took time 
and great ark-loads of patience. . . . 

" And the country, O the luvely country- 
side, was just saved avore it was all spoiled 

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The TOWER 

and every farm cut up and all the pretty barns 
turned into Sunday motor sheds! The men 
from the Colonies and America who came over 
told us that we had to, an 5 I reckon it was 
wages first, and secondly cottages." 

" I remember," I said, " about the wages 
and that a fair minimum, subject to some tem- 
porary dodging, was secured by Act of Parlia- 
ment, without anyone being the worse for it. 
And do you tell me that the Wage Boards 
work well ? " 

" Yes," said the young Captain. " No 
doubt you have found our mining and railway 
and ship-building enterprises ' nationalised ' 
(as the word goes), but it is not so with agri- 
culture. The industry is far too varied and 
characteristic to be worked from a centre like 
London. Whitehall cannot understand or 
govern villages. The Home Parliament was 
happily persuaded of that, and wisely carried 
another change — of rating the country owners 
and the farmers not upon the annual rental 
but upon the capital value of the unimproved 
land. And so fair rates of pay for labour 
became possible, and the Wage Boards 
worked well — by scarcely having to be in- 
voked at all! " 

I pondered over this for a moment, gazing 

round at this prosperous small farm of two 

hundred acres before me which, for all the 

difficulty of its hill-side land that had chal- 

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The TOWER 

lenged the toil of husbandmen since Bretel 
held it in Domesday time, was clearly done 
well, and showed that the farmer was not " in 
the pocket " of the local dealers, but could 
hold his stocks over for a good market. 

My companions read my thoughts, and one 
of them said quietly : 

" Yes; this was taken by an enterprising 
man, whose wife saved in the War time, and 
his friends trusted him with some capital. He 
was teachable and resourceful, and his son, 
who has just lost him, will tell you that his 
father and mother never really regretted the 
adventure of leaving town life." 

The old man listened, and, eager not to be 
ignored, wagged his head in assent. 

" Yes, Tom," said the elder captain, " there 
was a big dislocation, I grant you, for many of 
the country gentry who paid the penalty for 
the mistakes of their forefathers. But not all 
were crippled, were they ?" 

The old man smiled faintly. 

" No, sir, not in the long run, I 'low. It 
took time for them to pull round a bit. And 
it meant perhaps a little less of the spending 
avore the War time on Scotch moors and 
Monte Carlo tables and other furrin' parts for 
many of 'em, and maybe it meant for many 
kind ladies and some lazy sons not so easy a 
time and a re-sorting of their lives an' 
pleasures. But I'm not a-goin' to rant about 

IOI 



The TOWER 

c no charity, but justice.' It's charity, a little 
more of the loving-kindness-sort-of-charity 
that we do want, for justice will come that way. 
The panicky Dukes might be selling up and 
buying big slices of Mother Earth in the 
Colonies to begin all the trouble of land-hold- 
ing and slums and unearned increment all over 
again. That's apart ! But the good, sensible 
sort of folk have stayed, and they'll have 
nothing to fear. In most cases, and I do be- 
lieve in all proper ones, the landlord and his 
tenant bargain now on equal footing, and each 
respects the other more. It's really a question 
of fairness and equity — and I say that of land, 
of land, mark you ! (for the Almighty hasn't 
made enough of it for us each to have a park) 
• — the proper rent for the owner is not what 
most he can get out of it, but what is left for 
him after them that manage it and till it to the 
best advantage have got a decent living." 

He paused for breath. This doctrine was 
an effort to him. 

" It's all fair dealing for the sake of 
efficiency," he muttered, as his clear thoughts 
found utterance. " The labourers aren't sus- 
picious and out o' heart, being better paid. 
They work the land with better spirit and 
better limb, and that means benefit to the 
State, as you gentry know better'n I do. You 
get them free-er from worry for old age, free-er 
from trouble and care about the childer'n, and 
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The TOWER 
it's mostly becos they can pay for better cot- 
tages. Yes — better cottages, that was the 
second great step, and every farm labourer 
able to pay a proper price for a proper home, 
with a tidy bit of land, too, for a different bit 
of work. Remember what the little Jap said : 
' Bean sauce that smells too much of bean 
sauce is not the best sort of bean sauce!' 
That's why he likes the village workshop or 
craft-school to go to as well, just as the city 
mechanic loves a bit of garden if only he can 
get it." 

" But," I said, " as I have made my rural 
ride through Sussex and Hampshire, much 
along the tracks that Cobbett took a century 
ago, I have found whole villages and colonies 
where the occupiers were owners." 

" Yes, mister, so they do tell, but I can 
hardly credit it. . . . Poor Tom's a-tired!" 

The old fellow spoke truly, and one of the 
others picked up the tale. 

" Yes, it is true. The problem, you see, 
was how to attract to rural life numbers of 
sturdy men of good intelligence, who, after a 
spell of rest from the grinding conditions of 
the warfaring, would be prepared for an 
adventure with a reasonable certainty. A 
greater desire for a share of the land they had 
saved was natural. The solution was drastic, 
but as fortunate as it was bold — nothing less 
than State-purchase on a large scale and a 
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The TOWER 

liberal way of access to capital through credit- 
banks. Our village-colonies, which you will 
have seen ? " . . . 

" I have," said I. 

" Were wisely projected on the right scale 
for securing social and economic advantages — 
that is, a hundred families was taken as a low 
unit for getting the beginnings of communal 
life, and the initial year was made easy with 
an outlay in expert guidance and financial help 
which thoroughly alarmed the old-fashioned 
economists. It was the only way — and it 
restored and revitalised rural England. Bold- 
ness is at all times the only policy ! " 

His older companion smiled. " You can 
afford to tell the tale," he said. " You were 
a bit of a boy when it was done, while I can 
remember. The exhausted Treasury called 
check. The German indemnity that was first 
pledged for Belgium only came in slowly as a 
security for good behaviour. Our own pro- 
ductivity was our only wealth — and the best ! 
But the money was found — ^300 to ^500 
for a family, with a sinking fund towards the 
purchase of the holding, and the cost of a day 
of the war achieved an affirmative, enduring 
miracle." 

" A miracle indeed, and that I have lived to 

see it," sighed Tom the pedlar, harping on his 

last word, old-man-wise, " cottages and wages, 

wages and cottages, them were the needs, and 

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The TOWER 

you got them, to save old England. Also 
scientific tillage, yes; and — and — the Bel- 
gians' way — what's it called — oh! intensive 
culture, yes. I know well what it all means, be • 
lieve me, though I find the label-words hard 
to get! Those things have all come, too, 
especially near the settled and crowded centres, 
with the big farms for corn crops and the 
grazing of the beasts and the flocks in the 
emptier parts, in the lovely rolling shires! 
And there are the big State farms for growing 
corn and foodstuffs for our soldiers and sailors 
and for raising beef and mutton and breeding 
horses and hundreds o' little homely farms o' 
five-and-twenty acres or so, which in my time 
of youth they derided because of the struggle 
they meant; but the supply of credit and co- 
operative stocks of implements and cattle and 
facilities for transport have relieved that 
struggle. 

" And then, of course, there's another 
great thing, though you gents be a-tired of me 
and my talk and want to get back to your 

scouting! There's the timber " (another 

of his little cards came out) " 9,000,000 acres 
in my young days were available without 
material encroachment upon agricultural 
land, and they found that the best rotation to 
secure sustained timber yields was 150,000 
acres to be afforested annually, and every year 
since it has been done, and not a year lost. 
105 



The TOWER 
Why, there was a man who was woodman to a 
squire up Blandford way who told me that 
he'd read in a proper paper that they used to 
ship to this country over ten million tons of 
timber against the two million tons we grew, 
and that 90 per cent, of that ten millions could 
be grown here and be a mine of wealth worth 
twenty million sovereigns! So that now 
timber forests grow again in the Ashdown 
vale and on Exmoor and the wastes of Scot- 
land, with all the vigorous and jolly life of 
the woodmen, from the big timber-sawyers 
like the men in the picture, and all along the 
grades of wood-working, with the glad cun- 
ning that delights in cutting and planning the 
stuff, hard or soft, to the best advantage for 
all man's needs, down to the very matches for 
your pipes! Think of what wood used to 
mean for England, for her ships and boats as 
well as for her homes and their furniture, and 
think of what it still can mean again! Cor- 
sican pines and spruces, Italian poplars and ash 
have been planted, wisely and well. And, slow 
though oaks be, set a dozen acorns here, gents, 
here — round about this hovel — prod the 
ground for the warm hollows for them, put 
them in and put a little fence of thorns around 
them, and fall on your knees like Mister 
Hurst, of Sherwood Forest, who used to say : 
" Now, good hap seize thee, little seed; grow 
in a manner worthy of thy noble parents and 
106 



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be a delight for many weary men whose light 
is not yet blown in ! ' " 

Tom knelt as he spoke it, and the children 
instinctively knelt with him, so that we others 
were aware of them; and it broke the spell. 

" Run, Winnie, child ! The rain's liftin', 
and ask your mother for a bit of hammet for 
old Tom, and tell her he's bringing new 
ribbons and buttons. . . . Ah, gents! 
There's better farming and better living at 
last, thank the Lord, and even poor old Tom 
knows it, though, in a manner of speaking, 
not of it. It was a big movement to get it, 
and praise to them that made it ! Co-operation 
did it! A big word, and an abstract kind of 
thing till you make sure of it — and then it's 
final and real and spells salvation. As you 
know, we had anarchy in our big industries. 
Britons didn't want a servile state, did they ? 
State Socialism all round would have throttled 
us if it had survived the war ! For citizenship 
and commonwealth, you don't want all life's 
ways of invention, genius, passion, soul, and 
waywardness — all the ways of love and loving- 
kindness — cribbed and fixed in one neat, hard, 
constraining framework. That's my prophecy, 
from a tired old man who sees into things and 
asks a blinded generation to open its eyes. 
. . . It's a fine world we're born to . . . 
and the countryside should for ever be kept 
beautiful, fuller of strong men and brave 
107 



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women, all social and kindly, helping one 
another to bring the goods home and praising 
God for life." 

The children returned as the old man 
settled wearily down by his pack, and we three 
set right our horses' bridles to go our own 
ways. With his bread and cheese came three 
mugs and a critch of cider, " For mother says 
as won't the gen'lemen take some, too, Mr. 
Tom, and welcome ! " 

Tom poured it and the mugs passed. 

" Here's health ! I'm old, misters, too old 
now to pick up the cow-tending and help lay 
the hedges. I do mark vor to be ending . . . 
and I'll see a little more of the New Life yet 
avore I go. But, here's health, I say, and may 
God help the countryside! . . . Here, 
children, here's picture cards for you — one for 
Winnie and another for Will'um, and some 
flowers for you, Missie, and a ship for 
Will'um. . . . No, thank ye, mister. I'll 
give these to the children and Mother'll buy 
the ribbons, all the same! . . . Good 
day, gents. . .'■• , Tom'll rest a bit in 
this lewth from the wind, now that the sun's 
a-shinin'." .... 

The soldiers and I parted; they to their 
summer-time practice in the healthy arts of 
home defence, and I to the joyous task of 
realising in somewise the happy rural revo- 
lution which had come to my Motherland. 
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As I proceeded on my tour I felt almost every- 
where that happy zest and pride in my 
country which came to that forthright patriot, 
William Cobbett, as he rode out to Redbourn 
and then turned off to the westward to go 
to High Wycombe, through Hempstead and 
Chesham, finding once more " that which is 
such an honour to England, and that which 
distinguishes it from all the rest of the world, 
namely, those neatly kept and productive 
little gardens round the labourers' houses, 
which are seldom unornamented with more or 
less of flowers." 

Spirit of Goldsmith, too despairingly you 
lamented in your Elegy on the Deserted 
Village 

That a bold peasantry, their country's pride, 
When once destroyed, can never be supplied. 

You will be the first from your Elysian 
walking-ground to ponder some new ode to 
" The Village Restored " that acclaims the 
new day : 

When every rood of ground maintains its man; 
For him light labour spreads her wholesome store, 
Just gives what life requires, but gives no more : 
His best companions innocence and health; 
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth. 



IO9 



t^t C^"» t^» 1^5 t^ t^J fc^J t^> t^3 t^» t^i l^J t^J t^l t^l t^> t^» t^» 

§IX. ON LEARNING TO LIVE 

Ctf^ '-^> t^*> t^> t^J <^ t^> t^J C^S C^> t^ t^> l&-> t^> t^ t^» t^5 t^l 

ONE evening, when, after wander- 
ing back to London, I had spent 
a day of keen pleasure in visiting 
ing some of the Regional and 
Civic Museums along the banks 
of the Thames, which struck me as more alive 
and pertinent than the huge Central Store- 
house in Bloomsbury, I listened to my host 
and his wife discussing school plans for their 
children. Well I remembered how puzzled 
my own parents had been about my own case, 
scarce trusting their own judgment. The 
children were in bed and should all have been 
asleep, only the boys were still drowsily dis- 
cussing the chances of a cruise round Poole 
Harbour in the summer to come. The girls 
were asleep. The maids of the household 
were out for a play at the local theatre. 

" It certainly is a problem," said the Father. 
" It always was in our time, too," said the 
Mother, " but it has to be settled, hasn't it ? " 
" Yes, fortunately, for even Arcadia would 
pall with only lambkins. . . . But it is a 
problem, and even our New Age finds it so 
still, with children as eager and youth as hot 
as ever." 

The Mother reflected. " Yes," she said, 
no 



The TOWER 
" so many of them are too hot and eager." 
And yet, in her steady, self-restraining way, 
she was herself the most progressive of 
women. ..." Still, they must have their 
way. If you educate, you must also give 
liberty and responsibility. Better to trust 
youth and leave it free than to try and stop 
the storm by sitting on the barometer ! How- 
ever, we haven't to think of that yet with 
ours." And her needles clicked over a boy's 
jersey. She, true to her sex, wanted to settle 
the problem in hand. 

" Haven't you settled that problem too ? " 
I smiled after all my lively experiences in this 
new world. 

" No," said the Husband; " what we Eng- 
lish scarcely do yet is to get at the whole 
theory of the thing, to see it steadily and 
whole. There's the aim to think of, whether 
Goethe of the old Germany was not right after 
all, that the forming of taste was more im- 
portant than communicating knowledge; 
whether all c the machinery of infection ' that 
we call education, being indeed the only hope 
of a nation and its most sacred concern, should 
not be devised for character and ability and 
handiness, rather than for knowledge pure and 
simple, the foster-parent of cunning and 
dodges. I'm thinking, I assure you, of what 
I still see rather too much of — in the 
market-place and the counting-house, in the 
in 



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manager's office and the board-room, although 
they say it was twenty-fold worse just before 
the War. I am no pessimist, and I steadily de- 
cline to growl always about declining human 
nature and our own neighbours' in particular. 
But I note for the children's sake that the 
dear things they are naturally made of — 
modesty, faithfulness, lovingness and cheer- 
fulness — are too often and too early lost. It 
was unavoidable so soon after the break from 
the stiff old education, and we must never go 
back to the old parlour accomplishments for 
the girls or teach boys that history began with 
1066 and that they mustn't ask about more 
than they are told. We teach the child to 
'observe' instead of remembering; it 'ob- 
serves ' us. We teach it to ' rely on itself ' • 
it no longer c relies ' on us. We teach it to 
c reason,' and it ' reasons out ' our argument 
and differs. I recognise all this, and I rather 
glory in the opportunity for those results. 
But, for the sake of every nation of humanity, 
we must not let them be the only results, still 
less the aims, of education." 

I listened and waited, and his wife smiled at 
me as she let him utter these generalities, for 
she knew that, man-like, he would get round 
to the point again. He was fond of " clear- 
ing the ground before building the hut." 

" You see, fortunately or not, man has in 
fact such an abnormally long youth compared 
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with the other animals. Youth is the time or* 
growth — of more than growth, of exuberance 
and high spirits. It is the period of curiosity 
and experiment, and in Britain above all, for 
the sake of a wise training, these should never 
be repressed, but rather encouraged. Do you 
remember what they say the clever Japanese 
visitor once said ? — " The Anglo-Saxon's 
nature is like a white paper, while some other 
nations' natures are like tinted papers. The 
Anglo-Saxons would be absolutely fools if 
they neglected their education, for they have 
no special gifts (like the French for art) — 
but they can be trained in any way in perfec- 
tion." Well, I believe he was right, and I 
would let the children plan and contrive at 
every turn to realise each his own limitations 
and to try to escape from them. To dam back 
his inquisitive instincts by excessive rule is to 
quell the springs of his activity, until at last, 
finding that no demand is made upon them, 
they cease to flow. It was to good purpose 
that before the upheaval of the War a Gov- 
ernment inspector reported a village school 
where the sluices, though always regulated, 
are permanently lifted, and the energies of the 
child are ever moving, with a strong and 
steady current, in whatever channel they may 
have chanced to enter. So strong, indeed, 
and so steady was the current, that it main- 
tained its movement long after the child had 

i 



The TOWER 

left school. . . . The employers of labour in 
the neighbourhood told him that there were 
no slackers or loafers in the yearly output of 
the school. For that was where, without fuss 
of prizes or punishments, joy in the work, 
pride in the school, devotion to a wise and 
kind teacher, were the sufficient incentives to 
happy industry." 

" Do you remember," said the Mother, 
" that Japanese system which your father used 
to quote, saying that it must have meant as 
much for the making of their heroic battles as 
for their wonderfulwork in arts and crafts be- 
fore they yielded to the corruption and folly of 
some Western ways which spoiled Tokio with 
a fatal touch of Manchester ? " 

" Yes. You mean what Kikuchi spoke of 
here in England," and the husband found the 
book on a shelf at hand. " Japan is still true 
to her old best self, for the War saved her 
from decay when her best statesmen and those 
of China brought them into the League of 
Nations. There, at any rate in Japan, in all 
the ordered cosmos of a well-laid and highly- 
detailed scheme, you have the provision of a 
multitudinous and an eager and nimble nation, 
inspired still by honour of the family c house ' 
and devotion to a sane patriotism for the train- 
ing of its children. Even the few Private 
Schools are under State-control, together with 
all the range of Elementary, Middle and 
114 



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Higher Schools — for children of all stations 
— with the branch schools, military, naval and 
nautical — the Universities and Colleges. 
You can read of the diligent care of detail — 
the choice of site, in a healthy area, free from 
noise, dust, smoke and everything injurious 
to health; the heating stoves and ventilation; 
the playgrounds; the apparatus — all those 
things which at last are quite freely done in 
our own schools and were for so long stupidly 
neglected in the schools to which, from 
plausible reasons of class-distinction, thou- 
sands of the fathers and mothers of our race 
were sent. Let me read to you this Preamble 
of the Japanese Educational Code, thought 
out in 1 87 1 — for I don't think you could 
find a better one still in either hemisphere 
for popular and modern purposes : — 

The only way in which an individual can raise him- 
self, manage his property and prosper in his business, 
and so accomplish his career, is by cultivating his morals, 
improving his intellect, and becoming proficient in 
arts; the cultivation of morals, the improvement of intel- 
lect, and proficiency in arts cannot be attained except 
through learning. This is the reason why schools are 
established; from language, writing, and reckoning for 
daily use, to knowledge necessary for officials, farmers, 
merchants, and artisans and craftsmen of every descrip- 
tion, to laws, politics, astronomy, medicine, etc., in 
fact, for all vocations of men, there is none that is not 
to be acquired by learning. Every man only after 
learning diligently, each according to his capacity, will 
be able to increase hi? property and prosper in his busi- 

"5 



The TOWER 

ness. Hence knowledge may be regarded as the capital 
for raising one's self; who can then do without learn- 
Those who wander about homeless, suffer from 



ingr 

hunger, break up their houses, and ruin themselves, 
come to such pass because they are without learning. 
Although long time has elapsed since there have been 
schools, through their being improperly administered, 
people have made a mistake of thinking that learning is 
a matter for those above " samurai " rank, and as for 
farmers, artisans, and merchants, as also for women, 
they have no idea of what learning is and think of it 
as something beyond their sphere. Even among those 
above " samurai " rank it is said that their learning is 
for the sake of the State, and not realising that it is the 
basis on which they are to raise themselves, they run 
into mere sentence-reciting and phrase-making, and fall 
into ways of empty theorising and vain talking so that 
although their discourses sound profound, they cannot 
be carried out in practice. All this is due to a long 
continued bad custom, and this is why enlightenment 
is not more widely propagated and so many people fall 
into poverty, bankruptcy, and loss of the house. Men 
must, therefore, acquire learning, and in learning must 
not mistake its true purport. Now a system of educa- 
tion has been determined at the Department of Educa- 
tion, and various regulations will be published in due 
course. It is intended that henceforth universally 
(without any distinction of class or sex) in a village there 
shall be no house without learning, and in a house no 
individual without learning. Fathers or elder brothers 
must take note of this intention, and bringing up their 
children or younger brothers with warm feeling of love 
must not fail to let them acquire learning. (As fof 
higher learning, that depends upon the capacity of indi- 
viduals, but it shall be regarded as a neglect of duty on 
the part of fathers or elder brothers should they fail to 
send young children to elementary school without dis- 
tinction of sex.) 1 1 5 



The TOWER 

Owing to the long continued bad habit of regarding 
learning as a matter for those above " samurai " rank, 
there are not a few who consider that, since their learn- 
ing is for the sake of the State, they need not learn 
unless they are supplied by the State not only with 
expenses necessary for study, but also with food and 
clothing, and so by neglecting learning spoil their whole 
life. This is a great mistake; henceforth such vicious 
custom must be done away with, and people in general 
leaving all else aside must make every effort to apply 
themselves to learning. 

He passed me the book, saying I should 
look at its Edicts and Proclamations, the re- 
scripts which, upon the death of the remark- 
able King in whose reign they were issued, 
occasioned the claim of his successor that 
"these measures in turn brought general 
good to the country and enhanced its prestige 
altogether," and elicited, as their Emperor lay 
dying, such a tribute of popular devotion. In 
that unhappy nineteenth century was there in 
the Western world a King of a cultivated race 
at whose passing a whole city would watch 
and pray at the temples day and night, for 
whom fishermen would make pilgrimage to 
the capital with his favourite fish, and nuns 
bring tortoises as symbols of longevity; 
counter to whose wishes actors, geishas, and 
wrestlers would close the theatres to swell the 
crowd round the Palace, across the moat of 
which numbers of schoolboys and schoolgirls 



The TOWER 

would recite prayers for the safe recovery of 
the Father of the People? 

" And did all that serve you any purpose ? " 
I asked, well remembering how impervious to 
foreign ideas my fellow citizens were in my 
own days, when the witty Frenchman de- 
clared, " Oh ! you islanders, each of whom is 
an island to himself! " 

" Why, yes," said the husband, " we 
found ourselves, under the stimulus of the 
War, willing at last to look to a good pattern 
provided for us by the lively people of the far 
East, with whom one of the old accidents of 
our history jumped us into alliance. With all 
allowance for different clime and diverse faith, 
art, and ethics, there seemed so much in 
common between British and Japanese essen- 
tials — shrewd and dogged patience in com- 
merce, inventiveness in big feats of industry, 
the independence of an island race, the love of 
animals and flowers, that the Japanese — who 
came on so fast, perilously fast, perhaps, as 
many think — could teach much to us as apt 
pupils when it was brought before us in ex- 
change for what we gave them. . . ." 

" The lesson was applied, of course, with- 
out Japanese labels. Our leaders knew our 
folk too well for that! There was at least 
one Education Minister, who, for an Oxford 
don, did wonders in a Yorkshire city, where, 
as Vice-Chancellor, he was in frequent request 
u8 



The TOWER 
as arbitrator among the men of commerce, 
just because his culture confirmed his equit- 
able, just outlook. It was he who, when the 
foundation-stones of our society were so 
shaken, quietly but courageously relaid them 
in his own department. He breathed a new 
gospel into the old truism that education is 
one of the good things of life to be more 
widely shared among the children of the 
country. He compelled the eager reformers 
who clamoured at his door to see that if they 
wanted to get the right spirit into the national 
education, the machinery had first to be over- 
hauled. He knew that what Labour suffered 
from in England and what gave certain vices 
to the Trade Unions was that the workers 
had not been trained. He roundly told their 
less-balanced leaders that true education was 
not, and should never be directed to become, 
mere propaganda for the abolition, say, of 
wage slavery, however undesirable that wage 
slavery might be. . . . He lent all the 
warmth of his personal sympathy, the power 
of his official status, to the labours of those 
working men and women, few, but influential 
through their courage and character, who were 
more concerned with the problem how to 
secure for the adult worker opportunities of 
study and mental training alongside of his 
wage-earning employment and in continued 
comradeship with members of his own class; 
119 



The TOWER 
less concerned with the old ( educational 
ladder ' theory and the itch for personal ad- 
vancement into the better-paid ranks of in- 
dustry or into professional life. Initiative, 
courage, independence would all feed on such 
comradeship — qualities springing in all 
human breasts as constantly as hope, and the 
more freely. Man's spirit, as he knew, could 
be trusted to be for ever pioneering. To dis- 
trust the self-confident or buoyant reach 
towards the future was a hateful thing. . . ." 
As the Father so talked the Mother slipped 
to the children's dormitory lest a bell at the 
door below should rouse them. 

"I'll let him in," said the Father. "I 
expect it is old Solon, on his way back from 
the House." 

At times in this way, it appears, these 
neighbour-comrades met, the Father, an 
actively busy engineer, but never imprisoned 
by his toil, and the Minister, one of the 
younger statesmen, his school friend, a man 
favoured, but unspoiled, by Fortune, impa- 
tient of hypocrisy in politics and self-seeking 
in politicians, trained to discriminate between 
men and measures by the legal work which he 
had suddenly abandoned for public office, 
trusted by all who knew him. 

" My dear man ! " he cried, " I have great 
news and must tell you and the Lady." 
" A new Turner print " — she smiled at 
120 



The TOWER 

him, as she came to the door — " or only a 
Government defeat? " 

" Madam, I can only punish you by saying 
that my news will be in all the papers to- 
morrow, else I could not tell even you ! No, 
it's splendid. The Guilds and Unions, to 
whom we gave the pledge about it six years 
ago, have all come into line at last. No ex- 
emption from school attendance, except for 
sickness, for any boy or girl under sixteen, and 
part-time training for all right up to eighteen. 
It is what we have been toiling for, and is now 
assured, the thing almost that matters most, 
for all that young life in its most plastic and 
docile period." 

" Tell our guest what you mean," said the 
Father. " He is rather puzzled by what he 
sees and hears about our schools." 

" Well, briefly, what we have accomplished 
since the War is this — always remembering 
the pioneers of it! — To cultivate the children 
for their lives, to teach them how to learn and 
not stuff them with crude facts, we saw a 
vision. We saw gently sloping planes for the 
children to climb ever on and on, with ever 
fresh relays, up the delectable mountains on 
whose peaks — never to be reached by man or 
woman — sit the figures of Pure Knowledge. 
We saw the boys and the girls, in happy com- 
radeship and vigour of health — else it were 
folly to instruct their brains — growing and 
121 



The TOWER 

growing as young creatures should be let to 
grow. We foresaw skill and mastery of 
material and zeal of industry all on a higher 
level and with a broadened base. We fore- 
saw a moral training drawn not only from 
physical drill and ordered games, but from the 
food of the intellect as well, else we should 
have our grown citizens still confusing ideas 
of public duty and private amusements, unable 
in later life to disentangle them. We foresaw 
the State guiding, stimulating, and even con- 
trolling — but not interfering locally, not un- 
duly trenching on the liberty of judging on 
the spot. 

" And in detail it is this — thus and thus " — 
and as Caesar must have done on the harbour 
wall or young Napoleon on a drum-head, this 
eager strategist handled imagined notes and 
schemes. " For the infants we planned more 
for eye and ear and hand than for the little 
brain. We founded Nursery Schools for them 
from two to six — oh, the struggle over that 
six years' limit with the teachers! These 
Baby Schools are voluntary — such happy 
places. Without them half the boon of the 
Schools for Mothers would be lost. Now, as I 
tell you, the children from that age will be 
obliged to come to the schools. Right through 
to sixteen and until they are eighteen, they 
must spend twenty hours a week in school and 
not more than twenty-five at labour. We have 
122 



The TOWER 

been drawing up to that right through these 
years — oh ! so slowly, and the battle has been 
so hard. You see, it involved the whole ques- 
tion of livelihood in its solution — the gradual 
stoppage of the maintenance allowances which 
the parents wanted until the Guilds secured 
the family workers their pay, and the redistri- 
bution of all the cost — our Central Govern- 
ment bearing three-fourths of the cost of all 
approved schemes of the local education 
authority. 55 

" You seem to have moved mountains, 55 I 
laughed. 

" Or got round them, 55 chuckled this 
merry public servant. " The way we did it 
was to divide England up into eight great 
educational provinces : Greater London one, 
Lancashire another, and so on, and a Uni- 
versity to every province. It was grand how 
Oxford and Cambridge stood the strain. You 
shall see one of these days of your visit, if you 
will spare it me, how it all works — each pro- 
vince with its own administrative Council, its 
representatives of its own University, and 
every local education authority co-opting the 
best men and women for its purposes in the 
district and representatives of the teachers 
as well. The secret of this plan 5 s success (it 
was Haldane 5 s originally, and now the new 
generation praises his name after the cruel 
and mean injustice they did him in the War- 
123 



The TOWER 

time) is that these Councils consider their own 
local schemes, the allocation of schools and 
scholars, questions of salaries and pensions, 
and the distribution both of teachers and of 
grants. The general thinking, the theory of 
the whole plan, is left to the Board of Educa- 
tion, and well they do it, free from the 
crowded administration and drowning detail 
of the old days. Oh! we have something 
worthy of England at last, the home of good 
craftsmen and gay inventors. . . . And as 
midnight is nearly striking I must leave you 
with that ! " 

The Mother was thinking of her own 
children, but also of their Motherland, and 
therefore willing for the hour to forget 
the difficult, immediate problem of how to 
choose among the many day-schools in the 
great city for her own children — reluctant to 
lose the real profit of school spirit and games- 
comradeship absent from home-teaching, but 
convinced that all barrack life is stunted in a 
shut-in garden, and that with a sensible and 
godly home for giving contact v/ith life's 
broader currents and deep vitalities, the day- 
school for both boys and girls supplies the 
richer moral training. 

" Yes," she said, " the school-rooms and 

the gymnasia and the workshops are our real 

c Dreadnoughts,' for the safety of our land, 

for the well-being of our sons and daughters." 

124 



The TOWER 

" Lady, you speak well," said the Minister, 
rising to go. " We woke the enthusiasm of 
the people and used the opportunity." 

Upstairs the Father and Mother looked at 
the children, serene and happy in their deep 
draught of sleeping, and prayed for their 
future. 

The Father lingered in his book-room to 
sort his memoranda for the morrow's round 
of work, and ended the long day with some 
comfortable words from a friendly shelf. 

Fie read Mazzini's letter to a parent, 
anxious for his boy's training : — 

Every man is a speciality, is capable of some definite 
thing. You must try to discover that special tendency, 
and then frame his education accordingly. After a 
general teaching of those branches which are good for 
any man, direct his studies towards the development of 
that special tendency which you will have discovered. 
Education means drawing out, educere, what is in the 
boy : not creating in him what is not. You cannot 
create. 

But one thing is, must be, common to all. You 
must give him a proper notion of what life is, and of 
what the world in which he has been put for the fulfil- 
ment of a task is. 

Life is a duty, a function, a mission. For God's sake 
do not teach him any Benthamite theory about happi- 
ness, either individual or collective. A creed of indi- 
vidual happiness would make him an egotist : a creed 
of collective happiness will reach the same result soon 
or late. . . . 

Teach him that Life has no sense unless being a 
task . . . that the basis of all Truth is the know- 
125 



The TOWER 

ledge of the Law of Life, which is indefinite Progres- 
sion : that to this Law he must be a servant. . . . 

Elementary astronomy, elementary geology, ought to 
be taught as soon as possible. Then universal history, 
then languages. 

The difficult thing is to get the proper teach- 
ing. . . . 

I would not teach any positive religion; but the great 
fundamental Trinity, God, the immortality of the soul, 
the necessity of a religion as a common link of brother- 
hood for mankind, grounded on the acknowledgment 
of the Law of Progression. At a later period he will 
choose. . . . 

In one word, a religious conception of life — then a 
full notion of the world he lives in — then the special 
branch of activity to which he seems inclined. That 
is the whole of education for your boy. 



126 



§X. A MIDSUMMER FESTIVAL 

LONDON still remains the hom- 
ing centre for all our English-speak- 
ing peoples to which Time's turning 
wheel has brought so many changes. 
London has always been beautiful 
in June, not only in lyrical moments to stir 
Wordsworth to a sonnet, but with a settled 
peculiar amenity of bright greenery among 
grey buildings and a gay movement of the 
thronged thoroughfares; too attractive even 
in the old days to let you be troubled about 
what was hidden or suppressed, crushed or 
destitute. 

To-day, especially, I find London the 
theatre of a great and stirring scene, so that the 
City glows, body and spirit, with fervid and 
articulate sensations such as come to a man or 
woman on wedding morn or on the achieve- 
ment of high purpose. 

It is Britain's Midsummer Festival, the 
latest of the quinquennial lustral ceremonies 
with which the Mother City, like Athens of 
old with her " Panathenia " of each fourth 
year, celebrates the Past and, by a high act of 
Present Service, passes into the Future. 

From the great Park in the West, close to 
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Kensington Palace, which has been happily 
preferred as the London home of the titular 
President of the Commonwealth, to the great 
Park in the East, near the Shipping Docks, 
where are set out the Music and Amusement 
Halls and the Gymnasia and Playing-fields of 
the Mother City's swarming people, the 
Festival scene moves through the morning, 
pausing at St. Paul's for the double Act of 
Commemoration and ThankofFering. 

Let us watch, as it approaches the majestic 
Cathedral raised by Wren's genius to the 
honour of God, the Pageant which thousands 
of citizens from London itself and from the 
other great cities and country shires of our 
Islands have been watching along the wide 
ways of the Parks on either side of Common- 
wealth House (that of old was Buckingham 
Palace) and through the broadened Strand, 
around the clustered Colonial Offices, and in 
the narrowing historic ways of the commer- 
cial city; which thousands more will be watch- 
ing down the tortuous streets of older London 
as it brings a tantalising and yet ennobling 
vision to the dwellers in those great tracts of 
homes between Aldgate and the Docks, who 
serve the laws of modern Industry. 

I speak of no uncharted Atlantis, no un- 
packed Utopia, and yet how much of the 
noble and worthy Human Drama is found in 
this processional scene ! 
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The TOWER 

For the waiting hours, massed choirs have 
been submitting hymns and chorales to the 
blue Heaven above from the broad steps of 
the Cathedral and from its high flanking 
towers. 

These things shall be ! A loftier race 

Than e'er the world hath known shall rise 

With flame of freedom in their souls, 
And light of science in their eyes. 

And then Carpenter's 

England, arise ! The long, long night is over — 
and Whittier's hymn of patriotism : 

Our thought of thee is glad with hope, 
Dear country of our love and prayers; 

The way is down no fatal slope, 
But up to freer sun and airs. 

Thrice, as the clock hours have struck a 
stillness into the summer air, the clear voice of 
a singing party and assisting trumpets have 
fallen faintly down on attentive ears from the 
very balcony above the dome, as when travel- 
lers are welcomed from the summit of some 
Bavarian Town Hall, or early townsfolk and 
scholars once more gather round Magdalen 
Tower at Oxford on a May morning. 

But hark, ye folk ! 

It is high noon, and a great stir comes from 
the West, gently smiting the senses of the 
dense spectators. Through the arch of the 
noble Trophy which London's Art Schools 
have adorned for the City Guilds, where an 
129 K 



The TOWER 

ugly little bridge used to span the bottom of 
Ludgate Hill, come the swelling strains of 
brass and drum. The jolly crowd on the 
edges of the Hill is seen yielding to the 
mounted constables — the patient Civic 
Centaurs that alone remain to remind us of 
the sorry spectacle of the long-abandoned 
November " Shows." 

As the " March " ends off for the climbing 
of the Hill, and the Cathedral Front rises be- 
fore their glad eyes, a chosen throng of chil- 
dren — young London! — borne on a dozen 
high-banked and easy-swinging waggons, 
burst into 

God of Britain, God of London, 
Guarding all our People's needs — 

and the Cathedral choirs respond in anti- 
phony. 

From now, the Progress flows on like a 
gladdening tide. It is movement of banners 
and music, changing cosmos of colour- 
schemes and human groupings all the way. 
Lithe lads and merry maids — their swinging 
carriage and the glow of their limbs and 
faces declaiming the value of the happy drill- 
teams that they march in (the twenty vic- 
torious companies of the year) — follow up 
the cars of children, and how the people clap 
them and think of their healthful promise! 

Close after them, proclaimed in successive 
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groups by high-borne symbols of the Instru- 
ments of Education — a Triumph-Car of 
Geometry, a Bower of Botany, an Astronomy 
Camera, models of Architecture under a 
wreathed screen of Town-Planning, the tabled 
emblems of the Arts and Music and the 
Natural Sciences, twain images of Religion 
and Wisdom — march a multitude of students 
of both sexes, chosen through the last five 
years from London and Oxford, from Edin- 
burgh and Cambridge, and Sheffield and 
Bristol and all the other seats of the British 
University : the heralds of the ever-new 
learning, to-day's bearers of the lamps of the 
old, old Knowledge. Each score represent- 
ing a myriad of young Britons, and escorted by 
comrades from the over-seas Dominions and 
the other States of Europe, this joyous band 
wakens a great ovation and kindles many 
a veteran memory of struggling school- 
conference and educational turmoil — there is 
the air of a Revolution, hardly but gloriously 
won. 

Youths and maidens those — and what is 
this steadier tramp and tread, with faces still 
happy, but happy with a kind of grave dignity, 
and a general mien and bearing as of real task- 
bearers, of Labour in the actual toiling? 
There is no make-believe in this carnival, for 
it is a Pageant of Realities. These, then, 
are the "Workers by brains and hands — dele-^ 
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The TOWER 

gates from the great Guilds and Trades 
Societies, managers and operatives, shrewd 
captains in industry and mastercraftsmen, 
skilled toilers, the members of small work- 
shops, rough navvies, apprentices, both lads 
and girls (but none of the latter from pit or 
chain-works or sweated tailoring), no mothers 
(honour to them and praise to men!), of 
children hardly any. Again, the emblems and 
the banners, all proudly borne, symbolising 
a varied production for service and use, pro- 
claim the crafts and trades — railwaymen and 
bakers, provisioners and packers, all the allied 
servers of building, weaving, agriculture, 
engineering and outfitting, miners and wharf- 
ingers, dock-hands and bargees, clerks and 
salesmen, printers and publishers, black- 
smiths and tinsmiths — do you sometimes 
think — O spectator! — of all the different 
producers whose handiwork you really want 
in this modern life, to say nothing of those 
that toil over what is not really wanted by 
either you or them ? Well, here, on this gay 
June morning, they come to make hearty con- 
fession and proclamation of their Labour, and 
is it not well that they should — lest we forget 
what is involved in the townsman's struggle 
against Nature? This Progress of their 
delegates helps the loyalty and goodwill of 
workshop, counting-house, furnace, dock- 
side, and pit-head, and gives a public sanction 
132 



The TOWER 

to Labour. This is the true National Service, 
a cheerful conscription which he who shirks 
is a waster, be he born in castle or cottage, 
for all these, like them that follow so close 
upon them — the doctors and the nurses, the 
economists and the lawyers, the engineers and 
architects, the artists and the learned pro- 
fessors — have volunteered (for livelihood, no 
doubt, and why not?), to serve the nation's 
needs for thirty or forty years, two at least 
spent in camp and training ground for 
defence of the Tower of the Motherland. 
That is why it is congruous at last for this 
great chapter of the Progress to culminate 
in this year's Votive Image of the Festival, 
the prize-winning sculpture to show forth 
" The Nation " which each fifth year, after 
its benediction in the Cathedral, shall be set 
in a leading town in the shires — to stand 
for a memory and a trumpet-call to all who 
see it. 

The Image is escorted round its ox-drawn 
car — and how the people cheer them! — by 
the twenty winners, since the last Festival, of 
the Silver-Medals for heroic thoughts and 
deeds — a stalwart sailor, a brave nursemaid, 
a carter, a song-maker, a street constable, a 
harbour-master, a surgeon, a sewerman, a sig- 
nalman, a peacemaker, and the rest of them: 
there are three missing, but their sons or their 
friends carry their wreaths of laurel. 
133 



The TOWER 

These are a folk who prove that War is 
not wanted to make heroes. The dogmas of 
a Treitschke about " a drastic medicine for 
ailing humanity," or a Bernhardi on War's 
" biological justice," have been discarded 
upon the scrap-heap of modern environment. 
This healthy people have insisted upon the 
prevention of the moods and modes by which 
autocrats and profiteerers were shown to have 
created the tragic folly of the great War. But 
man cannot in a generation root out the mis- 
chief of a century or compete with Providence 
which provided evil in his constitution. 
Therefore, as I am telling you of a day when 
humanity is still, by its birthright, aiming at 
the unattainable goals of universal brother- 
hood and love, you will not be surprised, but 
rather heartened, if I narrate that at the 
next stage of the pageant I hear the regular 
tramp of strong men and the clatter of keen 
horses. These are the Defenders, battalions 
of territorial " foot and horse," proud of their 
smart trappings, prouder still, with a sturdy 
sincerity, of their months of willing service 
(camp-toil, camp-comradeship), conscious in 
their new generation of the need to learn hard 
drill and healthy drudgery, to bear and tug at 
burdens in hot or in dirty weather, to risk 
limb and life itself if Home Defence or a High 
Crusade should call for it. 

Our island-crowd still loves a sailor. Pin- 
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The TOWER 
nace and Lifeboat and Trawler and Hydro- 
plane, each with its crew, come up the Hill to 
tell a tale of daring to the huzzaing crowd, so 
that the very shire-horses that draw the lorries 
seem infected with the joy of it. A company 
of jolly mariners, swinging as easy as the sea, 
heralds the River Pageant of the later day, of 
which you shall presently hear. 

The happy crowd that hangs from windows 
and lines the pavements is now at top pitch 
of eager welcome. A hearty cheer goes to 
the three Pageant Masters on their steeds, each 
with his mounted Messenger — the Master of 
the Progress, he of the Music, and he of the 
Decoration. 

There follow them the chanting priests and 
censor-acolytes of Britain's Great Christian 
Church, disestablished into greater honour, 
disendowed for juster freedom. The Bishops 
come nobly up, some in rich copes and vest- 
ments, to honour the Lord God Omnipotent, 
some in simpler habit, like a Savonarola or a 
Wesley, as they think fit to see the call of their 
Master. All around and behind them move 
the Alms-Gatherers, collecting into a Treasury 
Waggon all the little bags and packets of 
money that the spectators along the route 
contribute with ready freedom to the great 
Festival Offering for the Poor and Sick of the 
State Almshouses and Hospitals. 

And now, with proper pomp and honour, 

*3S 



The TOWER 

come the President and Governors of the 
Commonwealth, the trustees of our demo- 
cracy, the ministers of our strangely balanced 
constitution — in spirit as well as in fact more 
representative than of old, and still, in part, 
for the high uses of home and imperial and 
international ceremony and symbolism, here- 
ditary, as belongs to a royal line of Kings, 
with a reasonable adjustment of homage and 
reward to merit and service rendered — a task 
not so difficult as you might suppose, with 
prepossessions of authority frankly removed 
and sham ornament and offices abolished. The 
President's Councillors are, outwardly as of 
old, so many Secretaries of State, the people's 
representatives,chosen and exchanged through 
the free play of talent and emulation, crossed 
a little by the caprices of elections, even with 
the franchise extended to trades and profes- 
sions, but approaching so much nearer to the 
best standard of the right men and women for 
the right offices, that you would say a genuine 
aristocracy was at work for the happiness of 
the State. And you can tell that these who 
make the Government give satisfaction to the 
people from the hearty greetings that attend 
them and because, reasonably dignified and 
modest withal in their bearing, they look 
pleased at their reception and not ashamed to 
take it. It was not always so with politicians ! 
Following this central group of the Execu- 
136 



The TOWER 
tive Government and Parliamentarians come 
the Judges, grave and experienced arbiters of 
the tangled quarrels and disputes which no 
simple or complex society can avoid ; sagacious 
and sensible critics of human foibles and delin- 
quencies; accurate measurers and dispensers of 
our now codified Law, simplified each twenty 
years out of the complex of cases and 
precedents. 

And behind them, with a well-blazoned 
banner from each county (we reckon more by 
the shires now than by cities), step the mayors 
and councillors and magistrates of municipal 
life, many honoured women among them, 
delegates by ballot of the worthy and well- 
paid multitude who, for the next five years, 
and perhaps for as long and as long again, 
will administer to the health and safety and 
education of the people. 

And at last, heralded by gay marching 
music and alternating chants, come the two 
closing companies of this Civic Pageant, ac- 
claimed by loud and echoing hand-claps and 
cries of welcome. First, a phalanx (so certain 
and proud is their stepping) of the Veterans 
and Reservists of the Army of Labour, of 
them that have by brains and hands, as em- 
ployers or employed, managers and operatives, 
wise captains of industry and master-crafts- 
men, skilled toilers and rough navvies, fought 
the good fight, and are now, either at slackened 
137 



The TOWER 

speed or in trust-posts on the trade executives 
of Guilds or co-operative unions, or as 
honoured pensioners, watching what the 
youngsters can do; the men whose talk fights 
the old fight again and thanks Heaven that 
the new one is not easier, but juster. And 
after them, fenced off by the mounted 
constables from the buzzing crowd of on- 
lookers that swarm over the route, comes the 
merry noise of the concluding Triumph, six 
joyful waggons of Mothers and Children, 
even the tired ones happy-looking, as proud 
as any in the Festival to represent a great 
Truth — Nature's richest and hopefullest 
Reality — Motherhood with its heroic pain 
and anxious tears; Motherhood quietly glory- 
ing in Sons and Daughters. 

Such a Progress, spelling democracy and 
not dynasty, no starved survival, but a vivid 
expression of the modern nation, lets its idea 
out upon a wide and permeating flow of active 
beneficence. With far-felt tremors beyond the 
centre of the day's actors and spectators, its 
influence wells and pulses to uplifting ends. 

As evening begins to come from the east 
the River Pageant is enacted. 

At another time, if you do not know of 

it, you shall hear of the great solemn rite in 

the Cathedral, with the benediction of the 

Image between moving chants and hymns of 

138 



The TOWER 

praise and passages of deep, worshipful silence 
and thanksgiving. And if five years on you 
are a councillor or a hero, or perhaps, best of 
all, a youth or a maid, and so take a place 
in the Progress, why, then you will know for 
yourself what happens and how the Service 
purges and kindles your soul. And you will 
recount to your friends in Hampstead or in 
Woolwich or in Fulham, it may be, or in the 
Midlands, or in Wessex or in Northumbria, 
how the President rendered up the People's 
thanks and the People's Vow to God through 
the mediation of the Priests; how, as on 
another great day, there rose, chanted by half 
the choir, those words of noblest poetry : 

" A new commandment — a new command- 
ment, I give unto you. . . ." To be an- 
swered by the voices on the other side : " That 
ye love — ye love one another ! " 

And again: "7 have called you friends. 
Te are my friends ." With the reply : " If 
ye do the things which I command you." 

And yet again : " The words that I speak 
unto you." . . . They — they are spirit; and 

they are life ! " 

and how, after a moment's silence, all the 
voices gathering into one harmony, sent the 
last versicle ringing through the arches of the 
choir and among the springing tracery above 
the clerestory : 

139 



The TOWER 

" Lord, to whom shall we gof . . . Thou — 
Thou hast the words of eternal life I " 

And now all the great membership of the 
Pageant streams through the wide doors to 
take noonday rest and refreshment before 
carrying its lustral Triumph along the dense- 
packed ways to the Docks of the Port of 
London, thence to disperse homewards after 
giving the President and the Governors to 
their splendid Barge. With the Marine 
Pageant on the Thames the Day's Progressing 
will end, the Ministers disembarking at West- 
minster to attend the final Benediction of the 
Festival in the Abbey, and the people to mass 
in the public Places for the gorgeous illumina- 
tions and the stirring strains of national music. 

Well, as I have said, the evening begins 
to come from the East, and with it the stream- 
ing and eddying flood-tide. All up the Pool, 
and as far as the first Bridge, the full-throated 
cheering of a host of seamen, Britons and 
other mariners who are the carriers of a 
world-wide export and import commerce of 
every race and clime, acclaim the great Barge. 
Sped easily by the double oarage of fifty water- 
men, with musicians at the prow to play the 
National hymns, and on the dais astern the 
Nation's chosen rulers to take the homage 
of the seas for our Islands, it passes, a rich 
gem, with garlands and bunting reflected in 
the tide's opal setting, up the centre of the 
foirway . 1 40 



The TOWER 

Within the first bridge (the outer gate, as 
it were, to the home-citadel of this happier 
land) begins the last ovation of the day's 
Festival. On the Southern bank, now as 
well as on the Northern, rise noble buildings 
— the separate offices of imperial and muni- 
cipal government — set spaciously in well- 
planned gardens, much as Wren would have 
set the Halls of the City Guilds and as, in- 
deed, the gardens of the Temple are still set 
out. From and through the wide regions 
of London beyond the Embankments has 
poured a huge and eager concourse, ranged 
now along two miles of either shore on slop- 
ing banks of timber. And between it, on 
either side, and the middle fairway, lie at their 
anchor long lines of smaller shipping and 
pleasure craft, all deftly ordered between the 
armoured boats that are the British contribu- 
tion to the police-navy of the leagued 
nations, half from the Home Fleets, and the 
others, as their flags proclaim them, from 
Overseas, from the Free States and Colonies 
of the Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth greeting 
the Folk of their Mother-Country. 

The pastoral poet, the monk, the misan- 
thrope, the chemist, might all, for their vary- 
ing good reasons, prefer a different scene. 

But these, too, like the philosophers that 
may lean on wayside railings to gaze at a fine 
piece of navvy labour, like the priest brought 
141 



The TOWER 
from his holy closet to his gate as the mock 
bravura of a travelling circus wakes up the 
village green, will be round on the edges of 
this great acclaiming crowd. For it is a dra- 
matic episode apt to stir wonder at Man's 
busy struggles with the forces of Fate. The 
physical scene owes to great Nature, with her 
disposition of sloping hills and ^curving 
stream under the blue midsummer dome, 
whatever of wholeness and congruity it has 
for the eye to gaze upon. And it is Man who 
has flung his bridges, levelled his great flank- 
ing roadways and, on south side now as well 
as north, with cunning mind of architect and 
sweat- toil of labourer, raised the storied hives 
of industry and of administration. To-day it 
is great holiday, and who shall grudge it, to 
starve a people of its vision and rob them of 
a big communal festival? To-morrow we 
shall all drop back to work — in counting- 
house, factory, home, workshop, magazine, 
law-court, laboratory, engine-room, granary, 
dock and building shed, conscious, a 
little more keenly, a little more warmly, 
of the enfolding City, of the island- 
nation of Britain like a Tower in 
the sea, of the kindred race beyond and 
around the oceans, of the Human Brother- 
hood which man is for ever gathering into 
closer focus. We do not think of it, as the 
merry noise of the festival music smites our 
142 






The TOWER 
ears, as the delighted eye picks out its own 
pictures of holiday spectators, a canopied 
balcony, a bridge arch wreathed with gay 
bunting, a patrol boat saluting a Canadian 
gunboat, a Natal pinnace greeting its Vic- 
torian neighbour. We do not think of it at 
the moment — unless the pastoral poet, the 
monk, the misanthrope, and the chemist are 
thinking of it, as they probably are ! 

But the group of Ministers on the 
barge, which now swims forward on the tide 
like some great, proud swan, are thinking of 
it, tired as they be, but cheerful still, with the 
long day's ceremony. For they are the 
Governors of the Commonwealth, and, for all 
the suspicious yappings and tricky subterfuges 
that always attend public servants, they are the 
strong men, observing honour and fidelity to 
the public weal in a fierce light. They see be- 
hind and beyond the palpable scene — they feel 
it, and they know that thought and labour at 
home and overseas, in the towns, and through 
the countryside, on the veldt, in the cotton 
fields and rubber plantations, on the sheep 
farms, in under-mines, and in many a noisy 
city are contributing to this Festival, and that 
the people hunger and so are fed. It is theirs 
*o govern and obtain fair-dealing, avoiding 
war by peace, preventing trouble by goodwill, 
patient but tenacious of all that is just and 
sound both in thought and in courageous 

H3 



The TOWER 

action, uncompromising in love of the good 
and in rejection of the bad. 

So at last in my Dream, before the fresh air 
of the sunlit morning revived my senses to 
remind me that the Vision of to-day is the Fact 
of to-morrow, I seemed to echo the prayer of 
the Indian poet of our modern time : 

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held 
high; 

Where knowledge is free; 

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 
by narrow domestic walls; 

Where words come out from the depth of truth; 

Where tireless striving stretches its arm towards 
perfection ; 

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way 
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; 

Where the mind is led forward by Thee into ever- 
widening thought and action, 

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country 
awake. 



M tie PELICAN PRESS, Gougk Square, Fleet Street, E.C 



THE NEW BRITAIN 

EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS 

" An anticipatory description of a Britain thirty years hence, with the 
items of a new simple democratic programme of a purified community." 

The Times, 
"It is all so practical and so well within our reach." 

The Challenge, 

"The chief object of the book is to portray the changes brought about 
in the industrial system, the new type of town arising therefrom, and the 
revival of the countryside. . . . Few, T think, could read- ' A Midsummei 
Festival ' without emotion and a wish that they might live to witness anc 
take part in such a festival." 

J. F. Green, M.P., in The Tositivist %eyiew 

" If this country of ours fifty or sixty years hence will be anything lik< 
the picture given by this ingenious, scholarly, cultured and delightfu 
writer, it will be near enough Utopia to merit the name." 

The Scotsman 

" It is an England that could blossom out of the present, if only th< 
spirit and the intelligence of man have been sufficiently quickened by thi 
scourge of War. . . . Within these stimulating pages the reader wil 
discover the secret of the metamorphosis." 

Welsh Outlook 



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